


ene aye e 
erent e erent reeme 
— te 


ne ne ee ee ee ee 





~ 

aaomemeneerne = - 
ar ne Nine A RRR heim rd hts nt Salida hee AAS pecinssninc nae MARIO NEE WN 
a ATARI ST Rae [een an STENT fy sa SAI St 


amen Se ss ter SoS ISAS seen ca cn ee roca SP ee me arecninapetea tenedoperenr cht St cence ARES ag er cl Pie SOARS RE EASA TE ad Pee ILS RARE AMARA AACR TON ea TCE PETE AEE ERIE AR cI CTL LAN APE TANT eee 








i 


Ha 
| 
if 

















[a ————— eeeeeerade ae 
hqae ene mamagagpnerasereneraerer arse a, 
een — ae REE Sg 
en AT arene mec 
aa Ca ppm 
ee 
et 
ET . 
wee ere oe we eee e =~ ee ee a ee pT iE Eten Pine, 28 
ee ee - —— 
Ae uieesE ean | ethan a eng e - pe teat 
Senna grea menpeene Saree nema RON aiagsaw— <a caermantuaees — a TY AED eer 
rn ae OI eee” SEGRE retour, neat ommaearsneemintr a = RCRA SEAS. Se IONE LS FEO 
een tpenenencempepernanesaincie ponent By eee ee eee ree 
ee le —_—_—_——— ——_ one ee Na 
SSIS SSA etna Aan EI SEP REIONRSE BENE a) GUA SS an a TTT AE EC TT ET ATRIA 
eC RR he ee pl pap pT 
Se NI AEE (RR | ea a 
—AAeeeeP UNTER R IRR EEEE SI Ft aetrsorena ae ene ——m, eneeneninen> ate St BIEL YSERA AAA LA AAI LAID DEDEDE ALL DLE ALLA ELLIE L EL 
meg eigen eae areerrnepmenerr ae ateraanenineseene | * peanamae CERN apESorereneE oe 9 SE EE ft nee pe scat EERSTE EDO > ARRAS SANS Sse PELE OPP rr peeneremeremrnn 
creep ecas pte hgenignaere areaaaetaSRp ores gsfilien-atepages | tsar oamneronreagyroncagte pretest TES SE ALENT TNE Se 
LL SATAN tani ~ wr weteneshane atin tenE RRS nes CREE 1a siSe Sein. “Sigel CePA ISUDS BONES LOE 1 SRO OO 
in naenen nantgt ay aiaheasipioas=sceaapcoe —rnareeiingiber paratuaieet= ——— eee — 
nr ne a mn a a TRS aa Sn EST EY EPR ORTSEAS —— 
ppsellipemneeeesliaataating tag tGapngherateainaigatrcaitneree eens -cbipamett;  bikianna ¢ -ectncienemetanetenes 9 <cenpepaprnyrseneerenenyrapapng pap esihay tar oAiae alee vanee eerste ark RRR 
EET SAS ATTEN ESE RE EE SAS Geechee cere = WALES LEA MEETS PPE SEWERS If PPS eh arena at inh tL eS el SRE UES Oh Side ISITE PECL ET OE SSRN RSME STE ———_——— 
ape ee Rn re re ee ee ee ee eee eee ooo - eh td a BO Nt tenet 
Cs pvlctansindatbenprnerrenta—tneeatirtut~payseltansabeaiaaberepescece SSTENSRSE) BEES” a, gpa IEA ARR Sens RE TESTER, GRRE URES ERIE Ot aI 
cE ER SS | eee re FSS CREE! 
eee enenennpe neste RRP See At TP nS NEE ETE SON AIS | it nanan See bee panei TF 
pioapinianareaengaahguanrestiabngpepaeescpana=nantgere=-—eirigeenes’ Takgeenpemtly. tra PASSE | SESS EN SAAS : Seg —— 
SS SA AP _ ln, a — 
ree ane |” Se ior ger ates ra aan me annmenip een rg ere enenprecenpre—pee=aporerpae ea 
———e NTR Fe Se ee lola 
SENSES egeeree ea | aw ATLEAST ETRE TIN SERENATA EOP eee 
marae orn aete ee. ~ PTE SEPT OATH) 5 Eine Reinet net alls EI SE VINOD SEEDS cn ad naa Soares ean eae sae 
serene estan a Sebel Bh eh te RINT TAA SR MEDT! SEAS TER NP IS a SR RODE IRL SI SRO at TEE CD TTD IITA EA AAPA - 
---— ooo me eS SS = IT =a - 
- ee er ae et aN SS 
~~ ———— — ples hGieraremnctegreroerenpem ‘ Se aaaeaaaaaaaassssaaasaSaaaaassssasasaaaaaaaaasaaasaaaasSaaassssssSSSSSSSSsSSSSsSa 
- RG,” SCIEN iH eene——hpoeene ee eererer rer 
ee | a oa Pe ae NS ——-- - 
Senee tre omer agen a aie | ap AS ee appre emg oop ope eo oo a RR A I 
aa Pa ot ST ES Sa ae eR OAS AE ERA At RELA, EPA I A ART TIAA ISS AE ALLE AAD DEAE DEAR ALLARD LAP ALLD: - — 
anne a ae - ne ig SES SE SSI LT TET EO IEE IID AOI DLE EE I CRE CA 
nw pi > eoeneamn — =o Sonat enn = a 
atunaieore ge ee a 




















LIBRARY OF THE 
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS 
AT URBANA-CHAMBPAIGN 


Gift of 
Henry Mueller 


Bookstacks 


Las =Vs= 


aoeoay Ce <a a as Tee 
‘S =. 


Comment = 






















A 


i cae “¢* NAA Le ms A 


BS ! # { (, : | 
a \é (i a4 Ao Ory he Me mes 4S + ie Ul to 


3. Bay Te fA te he ¢ hihi Wit se 
Meh cy 0-0. 1434 - 





ste me, . mB , \ \ \ \\ , 
Calne N Le RANA \ ‘) nn \\\\\ Wh WAAL 
‘ us i y 


NY 277TTICUILSVON VF BINT, 


slimes th pene ‘ 


\ 











-a(’ (he i Cou 43 eS TH 


¥ ne eee y if NAA\ La Gat te ochinny, 


4 ry, \( ved if, An Gk nf GF aprteA a LH CLA ) ¢ OES 
oi 
a Utd fA bow Me Gaaale a Casi 


iA. Hy AY. Aaa * 





Theft, mutilation, and underlining of books are reasons 
for disciplinary action and may result in dismissal from 
the University, 

To renew call Telephone Center, 333-8400 


UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS LIBRARY AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN 


~ 





L161—0.1096 


a 


ied 
t 


dpe 
ly ia 


- 
U 
x! 
. 
’ 
’ 
- 
. 
nf 





FAM RGIS Y 9 BC QI6 bid oa od 
Pree ART OF PORTRY 


AN AMPLIFIED VERSION 
WITH SUPPLEMENTARY ILLUSTRATIONS 
FOR STUDENTS OF ENGLISH 


BY 


LANE COOPER 


PROFESSOR OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE 
IN CORNELL UNIVERSITY 


AD 





NEW YORK 
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY 


+ 


Vv 


x 7 Bi 








we 
H a 
a eee 
aoe" 0 
: P } ’ iA AM et ) 
ie y tA . 5 : 
wy W Pw rahe 
9 : ee 
, J 4 
‘ P 
oN 
* j , 7 
COPYRIGHT, 1913, BY 
LANE COOPER 
sila at a 
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 
. gig. 
4 
¢ v 
2 "he i * 
Dyes 
tp 


TO 
ALBERT S. COOK 
PROFESSOR OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND 
LITERATURE IN YALE UNIVERSITY 
WHO HAS RENDERED INESTIMABLE SERVICES TO HIS 
NATION IN PROMOTING THE CULTIVATION OF 
POETRY AND SOUND LEARNING 


1 Pr Te 
th q “ 
} h a ‘ 
; RY 
ae 
i¥y 4) 
S| 4 , 
a La ’ ' 
At : 4 y 
' 7 f 1) 
it ‘ weak’ 
Pa i 2 voy. 
? : Me 
‘, 
i 
( , 
‘ ~ ¥ 
bay Po = 
’ af 
* 
7 
l 
i 
. 
' 
a 
| , 
i 
4 << 
. 
7 
x 
N 
yy 
i 
“ 
‘ 
‘ 
‘ 
. 
) 
j 
: 
é ’ 
j 
iG 
Ae 





PREEA CE 


This amplified rendering of the Poetics of Aristotle, 
I hope, will be useful to the student of literature in 
general, and perhaps not without suggestiveness even 
to scholars in the ancient classics. Primarily, however, 
it is designed for certain students of English that I 
meet with, who are capable of deriving profit from the 
substance of the treatise, but gain less on a first ac- 
quaintance with it in any modern translation than their 
efforts commonly deserve. Accordingly, my chief aim 
has been to make the subject matter of the work as 
intelligible as I thought it could be made for a first 
perusal by a kind of reader whose difficulties and initial 
mistakes I have come to know as a teacher of English. 
To this end I have employed a number of expedients, 
some of which may need a word of explanation. First 
of all, then, the original text has here been divided and 
expanded. 

The Poetics as it has come down to us may represent 
a part of Aristotle’s notes for a set of lectures, or per- 
haps for a dialogue; though now and then it seems 
more like the uneven memoranda of some person who 
attended the lectures. However this may be, and apart 
from any difficulties inherent in the subject, the treatise 
does not furnish easy reading. Superficially, it has the 


look of a continuous discourse without much articulation 
V 


vi PREFACE 


in the parts; it is divided into chapters, to be sure, yet 
in such a way that transitions in the thought are not 
always obvious. Of the special topics, again, though 
some are carefully expounded and amply illustrated, 
others are dismissed with a sentence or two. In partic- 
ular, the citations and other illustrations occasionally 
amount to the barest jottings, as ‘ Here is an example 
from the Bath Scene ’— the example not being added. 
When the illustrative matter only adds to the darkness 
of an abstract principle, how great is that darkness! 
The present version aims to indicate the chief divisions 
unmistakably, and, by a running marginal gloss and 
certain interpolations, the lesser divisions and transitions 
as well; to render many of the examples less enig- 
matical; and, in short, without seriously distorting the 
perspective of the original, to supply such information 
as may be needed at the moment for a better, if not 
a complete and final, understanding of the individual 
thoughts and their sequence. 

The reader that I have in mind may not be very 
systematic in the use of scholarly apparatus ; he might 
even neglect the assistance of a foot-note. In order to 
perform my intended office for him, I have not scrupled 
to expand the wording in passages where, if unalert, 
he might otherwise advance too quickly. Far from 
hoping to rival the excellent terseness of Bywater’s 
translation, or the smoothness (sometimes deceptive) 
of Butcher’s, I have generally been willing to delay 
the reader at the risk of circumlocution, or by explicit 
repetition of a thought which is implicitly carried along 
in the Greek, and have even dared to interrupt the 


PREFACE vil 


sequence by comments, long or short, where my stu- 
dents in the past have gone astray. In this way, for 
example, the unwary will not at the outset miss the 
emphasis one ought to lay upon the tragic catharsis 
or the tragic Zamartia; and certain misconceptions 
that frequently arise during the first perusal of the 
treatise, and tend to become rooted impressions, may 
likewise be avoided — for instance, the common mis- 
understanding of what Aristotle says on the relative 
importance of ‘character’ and ‘plot’. On the other 
hand, no point has been made of calling attention 
to discrepancies in the Poetics, except where they are 
particularly troublesome ; still, not all of the minor ones 
have been passed over in silence. 

Furthermore, an attempt has been made to suggest 
that the principles of Aristotle have a wider application 
than his own illustrations, drawn solely from Greek 
literature, may serve to reveal; and not only the main 
principles, but some of the lesser as well. It is proper, 
of course, to observe that his ideal of perfect tragedy 
is not independent of the traditions of the Attic drama, 
or of local usage on the stage of his own day. At the 
same time, it is the experience of those who concern 
themselves with the Poezics that, allowance being made 
for the tentative method underlying certain of its appar- 
ently hard and fast conclusions, the treatise gains new 
significance for the student of modern literature with 
every re-examination. It seems desirable that the pos- 
sibility of this wider application should, so to speak, 
be discovered from the first. I have therefore intro- 
duced sundry illustrations from familiar sources, chiefly 


vill PREFACE 


English, which may do away with any presupposition 
that the work can have no bearing, say, upon the 
modern ‘romantic’ drama. For example, Aristotle holds 
that to be on the verge of committing a deed of horror 
knowingly, and yet to refrain, makes an undesirable sit- 
uation in tragedy. His reasons may or may not seem 
cogent at first glance; but the situation itself can be 
illustrated as well by the instance of Hubert and Arthur 
in King John as by that of Haemon and Creon in Azn- 
tigone ; probably it is illustrated in Hamlet. My sup- 
plementary examples could readily be multiplied, but 
that would distend the translation, and might not leave 
enough to the ingenuity of the reader. Doubtless some 
of them could be replaced to advantage; I can only say ~ 
that in supplying examples I have tried to work in the 
spirit of the original, where the illustrative matter is sim- 
ple and direct rather than always meticulously precise. 

My additions are more extensive in the earlier part 
of the work, and decrease toward the close. I cannot 
hope that their tone, or style, will please the more 
experienced student of the Poetics; but it will not 
disturb the reader that I specially have in mind, for 
whose sake the additions have been printed in the 
same kind of type as the rest of the translation. It 
would be easy, on a second reading, to skip most of 
the interpolations, for the longer ones have all been 
enclosed in brackets, and the shorter ones also, when 
they interrupt the thought rather than help the reader 
on. Sometimes, as here and there in Chapter 25, it 
would be hard to draw the line between such liberties 
as a translator ordinarily may take in filling out the 


PREFACE ix 


sense of his interpretation and the liberties I have 
wished to take for the execution of a special purpose. 
In passages where the first person singular of the origi- 
nal has been avoided (and as applying to Aristotle it 
has been avoided throughout), and in paragraphs or sen- 
tences where things implicit from a preceding paragraph 
or sentence have been repeated, the use of brackets 
would generally interfere with the clearness or fluency 
which the changes from the original are intended to 
promote. My use of parentheses varies. 

It may not be improper to say that the notion of 
thus interpreting the Poetics may fairly be called my 
own; for I had examined neither Goulston nor Castel- 
vetro before I finished translating, and had no nearer 
prototype in mind than Dryden, or Pope, or Byron, in 
their adaptations of the treatises on poetry by Horace 
and Boileau, or Vida and Boileau in their adaptations 
of Horace. Needless to remark, I have not essayed the 
task of a poet like Dryden or Boileau, though I may 
have wished to do in a humble fashion for Aristotle 
what Hookham Frere so brilliantly accomplished for 
Aristophanes. 

Being a student of English, with only a general 
training in Greek, I have made liberal use of the 
means of interpretation which the taste and industry 
of specialists on Aristotle have provided. These means, 
including the contributions of Vahlen, I have regarded 
as virtually selected and assembled for me in the 
masterly edition of the Poetics by Professor Bywater 
(Clarendon Press, 1909), from whose conception of the 
text I have but seldom intentionally departed (and then 


x PREFACE 


in favor of traditional readings), and whose notes 
and translation I have steadily consulted. Sometimes 
—not too often, I hope—where he has found the 
inevitable English equivalent of a word or phrase in 
the Greek, I have followed his' rendering. Here and 
there I have borrowed also from the version of Pro- 
fessor Margoliouth— more rarely from that of Butcher 
—or sought help in the Latin of Tyrwhitt. In eluci- 
dating Chapter 25, I have availed myself of the analysis 
in the dissertation by Dr. Carroll. The example from 
Burke which is inserted in Chapter 17 was suggested 
by Professor Herbert Richards in the Classical Review 
for May, 1910; in fact, I have tried to profit by several — 
reviews of Bywater’s edition. 

Certain other matters, textual and the like, which are 
not suitable for discussion here, I hope to treat of later 
in a separate article. For the present, two of them 
may be briefly mentioned. If my version of the pas- 
sage and its context is correct, Bywater’s suggested 
transposition of four lines in Chapter 18 (his most 
considerable change in the text of the Poetics) is un- 
warranted. The presumption, of course, is in favor of 
the traditional sequence, and I am inclined to think my 
interpretation of the sequence unassailable. 

As for the tale of Mitys’ statue in Chapter 9, I have 
rendered the passage in accordance with Aristotle’s use 
of the verb Oewpeiv, and especially with his use of it 
in this treatise, disregarding the similar story in Plu- 
tarch, with the light it has been supposed to shed on 
the meaning of a word in the Poetics. I take this to 
be the widely disseminated tale, which appears in many 


PREFACE x1 


variant forms (for example, Molitre’s Don Juan, ou le 
Festin de Pierre), of the murder avenged by the statue 
of the victim. 

It only remains for me to record my sense of in- 
debtedness to several of my friends and pupils who 
have aided and encouraged me in the prosecution of 
this work; and in particular to my colleagues Professor 
Joseph Q. Adams, Professor Horace L. Jones, and 
Professor Frank Thilly, through whose taste and caution 
I have avoided a number of infelicities, and it may be 
of positive errors. 

LANE COOPER 
CoRNELL UNIVERSITY 


‘ 


ae Ne 


i. 
uy ye) an oii 
oh: ae ei ME 
* 
i Ms : am * 
4 ; i 
ree Le : 
i Wie By 
Atak) 
, ‘ 
var 
‘ 
a 
{ , I 
AY , ‘e, D ie 
ns Fy 
I - Ph | 
4 Sor 
i 4 4 
‘ he 
r 
§ 
" 
j 
_ 
ray 
P ‘ ine 
i 
‘ 
ry \ 
; ; 
, ad 
? i 
y , J fe y 
} 
\ 4 I 
; i 
: 
m 
, P 
° 
' 
< 
! ” 
Wiis 
. ig 
fh aks ~ 
’ y ; 
' P 
r ay 
‘ 
' 
4 | 
i 
‘ 
4 
j 
; ; Tas 
‘ 
, i 
: 
| 1] i 
( 
z % 
| y 
iq F 1 ' 
. 7 * y 
eo ; 
iV ‘ 
‘ ¥ 
e ‘ 
; 
u : 
ia 
J : 
. 
é 
i ‘ ’ 4 


Mea vi 
Oh atte heat iu io 





CONTENTS 


PAGE 


INTRODUCTION 
PMARACTER AND VALUE OF THE POETICS ... . XV 


ARISTOTLE ON THE ART OF POETRY 

I. Epic POETRY AND TRAGEDY, AND COMEDY, CON- 

SIDERED IN GENERAL AS FORMS OF IMITATIVE 
SARA ee Sat) Weel! fe ote Te Pag, Mean) UE 

II, TRAGEDY DEFINED. THE PRINCIPLES OF ITS 
IS OOS ge I Ae OY ee Rav RMD fy 

III, Epic POETRY. THE PRINCIPLES OF ITS CON- 
CO TAG LUE ROT a Us Doar tame OE ee RA iy oy 4 

IV. PROBLEMS IN CRITICISM. THE PRINCIPLES OF 
ELSI CION) ete uy ah!) et Ca ares, 3 Os 


C6 ESSN I Ry 


xiii 





INTRODUCTION 
CHARACTER AND VALUE OF THE POETICS 


Without Art, Nature can ne’er be perfect ; and without Nature, 
Art can claim no being. But our poet must beware that his study 
be not only to learn of himself; for he that shall affect to do that 
confesseth his ever having a fool to his master. He must read 
many, but ever the best and choicest: those that can teach him 
anything he must ever account his masters and reverence; among 
whom Horace and (he that taught him) Aristotle deserved to be 
the first in estimation. Aristotle was the first accurate critic and 
truest judge — nay, the greatest philosopher the world ever had; 
for he noted the vices of all knowledges, in all creatures, and out 
of many men’s perfections in a science he formed still one Art. 
So he taught us two offices together: how we ought to judge 
rightly of others, and what we ought to imitate specially in our- 
selves. But all this in vain without a natural wit, and a poetical 
nature in chief; for no man so soon as he knows this, or reads 
it, shall be able to write the better; but as he is adapted to it by 
Nature he shall grow the perfecter writer. — BEN JONSON.} 


I mean not here the prosody of a verse, which they could not 
but have hit on before among the rudiments of grammar; but that 
sublime art which in Aristotle’s Poetics, in Horace, and the Italian 
commentaries of Castelvetro [on Aristotle], Tasso, Mazzoni, and 
others, teaches what the laws of a true epic poem, what of a 
dramatic, what of a lyric, what ‘ decorum’ is, which is the grand 
masterpiece to observe. This would make them soon perceive 
what despicable creatures our common rhymers and play writers 


1 Discoveries, ed. Castelain, p. 127. Castelain notes the sources 
of Jonson’s free adaptations, in Stobaeus and Heinsius. 
XV 


XV1 INTRODUCTION 


be, and show them what religious, what glorious and magnificent 
use might be made of poetry, both in divine and human things. 
— MILTon.} 


Truly, Aristotle himself, in his Discourse of Poesy, plainly de- 
termineth this question, saying that poetry is . . . more philo- 
sophical and more studiously serious than history. His reason is, 
because poesy dealeth . . . with the universal consideration, and 
the history with . . . the particular. . . . Which reason of his, 
as all his, is most full of reason. — SIDNEY.? 


I adopt with full faith the principle of Aristotle, that poetry as 
poetry is essentially ideal, that it avoids and excludes all accident. ... 

To this accidentality I object, as contravening the essence of 
poetry, which Aristotle pronounces to be . . . the most intense, 
weighty, and philosophical product of human art; adding, as the 
reason, that it is the most catholic and abstract. — COLERIDGE.® 


Aristotle, I have been told, hath said that poetry is the most 
philosophic of all writing. It is so: its object is truth, not indi- 
vidual and local, but general, and operative; not standing upon 
external testimony, but carried alive into the heart by passion. 
— WoRDSWORTH.* 


Aristotle has spoken so much and so solidly upon the force of 
imitation, in his Poetics, that it makes any further discourse upon 
this subject the less necessary. — BURKE.® 


The book, taken as it is, with perhaps an occasional side-light 
from some of his other works, is intelligible enough; after a brief 
introduction, he gives us in outline all that he has to say on the 
subject immediately before him, the technique of the Drama and 
the Epic. He tells one, in fact, how to construct a good play and 
a good epic, just as in the Rhetoric he tells one how to make a 
good speech. And in doing this, he has succeeded in formulating 


1 Of Education, ed. Lockwood, p. 22. 

2 Defense of Poesy, ed. Cook, pp. 18, 19, 

8 Biographia Literaria, ed. Shawcross, 2. 33, 101. 
* Lyrical Ballads, ed. Littledale, p. 238. 

5 On the Sublime and Beautiful 1. 16. 


INTRODUCTION XVil 


once for all the great first principles of dramatic art, the canons of 
dramatic logic which even the most adventurous of modern drama- 
tists can only at his peril forget or set at naught. — BywaTER.! 


Next after the masterpieces of Hellenic art, including 
literary art, the Poetics of Aristotle is the most signifi- 
cant thing for the study of literature that has come down 
to us from Greek civilization. First of all, it represents 
the definitive judgment of the Greeks themselves upon 
two, and perhaps the leading two, Hellenic inventions, 
Epic Poetry and Tragic Drama. Though ample evi- 
dence be wanting as to the existence. of other strictly 
scientific investigations into the nature of poetry, that 
is, before Aristotle, and contemporary with him, we may 
assume that here as elsewhere in the round of know- 
ledge he is far from being an isolated scholar, but sys- 
tematizes and completes the work of predecessors, with 
an eye to the best thought and practice of his own time 
—and yet, unquestionably, with great independence of 
judgment. Another work of Aristotle in the same field, 
a dialogue Oz Poets, has not, it is commonly believed, 
survived. And if, in addition, one-half or one-third of 
the Poetics itself is lost, we should not wonder at the 
disappearance of similar works by lesser men. Indica- 
tions that Aristotle has considered not merely traditional 
and popular notions of the drama and the epic, but 
theories of literature of contemporary scholars as well, 
are not absent from the /oetics; see, for example, 
Chapters 25 and 26. It might be interesting to specu- 
late how much of this contemporary criticism filtered 


1 Aristotle on the Art of Poetry, p. viii. 


XViil INTRODUCTION 


down through the Alexandrian critics to Horace, and 
perhaps later, through channels we no longer can trace, 
to the Italian commentators of the Renaissance, in whom 
we find unexpected, yet seemingly conventional, modi- 
fications of Aristotle’s doctrines; but the salient fact 
for us is this, that if literary criticism in a broad sense 
begins with Aristophanes and Plato, in the narrower 
sense it begins with this work of Aristotle on poetry, 
which for ancient Greece is representative and final. 

The treatise is important, secondly, because directly 
or indirectly it has commanded more attention than any 
other book of literary criticism, so that the course of 
literary history subsequent to it is unintelligible without 
an acquaintance with the Poetzcs at first hand, whether 
in the original or through a translation. 

But further, the work has a permanent value, quite 
apart from historical considerations. Aristotle’s funda- 
mental assumptions, and the generalizations upon which 
he mainly insists, are as true of any modern literature 
as they are of his own. ‘That a work of art, for instance, 
—a drama, or the like — may be compared to a living 
organism, every part of whose structure is dependent 
upon the function of the whole, is a conception having 
validity for the ages. And the same may be affirmed 
of his contention that poetry has its own standard of 
correctness or fitness, and is to be judged primarily by 
its own laws. Of the minor generalizations, one that 
nowadays is often challenged concerns the social station 
of the tragic hero. It is maintained that Aristotle, hav- 
ing no prevision of the modern democratic movement, 
could hold no true opinion respecting the average man, 


INTRODUCTION XIX 


or the man in humble circumstances, as compared with 
the man of distinguished birth and position, in an im- 
portant tragic réle. To this it may be replied that Aris- 
totle had formed, and elsewhere expressed, a very just 
estimate of the relation of individual worth to external 
goods and hereditary name; that the age of Pericles, 
in which high tragedy flourished, was notably demo- 
cratic ; that Euripides had represented men of humble 
birth in tragedy; and that Aristotle’s own age, three 
generations after Euripides, and an age of despotism, 
took a somewhat unusual interest in burgher life upon 
the stage. It is easy to believe that many problems 
which are thought to be peculiar to the modern drama 
had been discussed, and were settled, in the theory of 
Aristotle’s time, and that the desirability, or undesira- 
bility, of choosing a tragic hero from the lower walks 
of life was among the mooted questions. After all, how 
little of the ancient Greek drama do we really know! 
— except for fragments, perhaps one-tenth of the plays 
of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, from among all 
the writers of tragedy in their age, and of the tragedies 
intervening between Euripides and Aristotle, virtually 
nothing unless it be the Rhesus, if the authorship of 
that is still in dispute. The generalizations of the Poetics 
were based upon a varied literature which has mostly 
disappeared, 

The treatise is further valuable for its method and 
perspective. Simply and directly it lays emphasis upon 
what is of first importance: upon the vital structure 
of a poem rather than the metre; upon the end and 
aim of tragedy in its effect upon the emotions rather 


XX INTRODUCTION 


than the history of the Chorus|(for the Chorus, by Aris. 
totle’s time, may have counted for less than it subse- 
quently does in the Roman closet-drama). The manner 
of presentation is not rhapsodical. Profound thoughts, 
in the main clear, are expressed in language suited to a 
scientific inquiry. There may be little, indeed, to sug- 
gest the ease and grace of style for which other works 
of Aristotle were commended in antiquity. Though the 
central thought of the Poetics, that the plot is the soul 
of tragedy, is an imaginative conception, a metaphor, 
in this work we need look for no ornate prose such as 
Shelley and Ruskin give way to in dealing with fine art. 
The tone of Aristotle may rather be compared to that 
of Leonardo da Vinci in his treatise on painting; and 
his procedure is a model of the way in which one ought 
to study a literary type. So far as we may gather, his 
mode of investigating the laws of poetry must have 
been somewhat as follows. 

Starting with the Platonic assumption that a literary 
form, an oration, for example, or a tragedy, has the 
nature of a living organism, Aristotle advanced to the 
position that each distinct kind of literature must have 
a definite and characteristic activity or function, and 
that this specific function or determinant principle must 
be equivalent to the effect which the form produces upon 
a competent observer ; that is, form and function being 
as it were interchangeable terms, the organism zs what 
it does to the person who is capable of judging what it 
does or ought to do. Then further, beginning again 
with the general literary estimates, in a measure naive, 
but in a measure also learned, that had become more or 


INTRODUCTION XX1 


less crystallized during the interval between the age of 
the Attic drama and his own time, and that enabled him 
to assign tentative values to one play and another, the 
great critic found a way to select out of a large extant 
literature a small number of tragedies which must neces- 
sarily conform more nearly than the rest to the ideal 
type. As in the Politics, which is based upon researches 
among a great number of municipal constitutions, yet 
_with emphasis upon a few, so in the Poetics his induc- 
tions for tragedy must repose upon a collection of in- 
stances as exhaustive as he knew how to make it without 
loss of perspective ; that is, his observation was inclu- 
sive so that he might not pass over what since the days 
of Bacon we have been accustomed to think of as ‘ cru- 
cial instances’. Bya penetrating scrutiny of these crucial 
instances in tragedy, he still more narrowly defined what 
ought to be the proper effect of this kind of literature 
upon the ideal spectator, namely, the effect which he 
terms the catharsis of pity and fear, the purgation of 
two disturbing emotions. Then, reasoning from func- 
tion back to form, and from form again to function, he 
would test each select tragedy, and every part of it, by 
the way in which the part and the whole conduced to 
this emotional relief. In this manner, he arrived at the 
conception of an ideal structure for tragedy, a pattern 
which, though never fully realized in any existing Greek 
drama, must yet constitute the standard for all of its 
kind. He proceeded, in fact, as does the anatomist, 
whose representation of the normal skeleton and mus- 
cles is an act of the imagination, ascending from the 
actual to an ideal truth, and is never quite realized in 


XXll INTRODUCTION 


any individual, though nearly realized in what one would 
consider a normal man; or perhaps as does the sculp- 
tor, who by an imaginative synthesis combines the ele- 
ments which he has observed in the finest specimens of 
humanity into a form more perfect than nature ever 
succeeds in producing. 

Finally, the Poetics, if it be sympathetically studied, 
may be thought to have a special value at the present 
time, when a school has arisen, led by the ingenious 
Professor Croce, whose notion seems to be that there 
really are no types in art, and hence no standards of in- 
terpretation and criticism save the aim of the individual 
writer or painter. In his tractate Of Education, Milton 
alludes to some ‘antidote’ in one part of literature to 
an evil tendency in another. Whenever the Poetics of 
Aristotle receives the attention it demands, it serves 
as an antidote to anarchy in criticism. 

We turn to a few separate points which the student 
may note before reading the translation. 

1. Poetry, for Aristotle, is a genus which is sharply 
divided into species, the noblest of which is tragedy. 
Taken together, these species — tragedy, comedy, the 
epic, and others, if others there were — would constitute 
the genus, without any surplus or residuum. He could 
not think of any poetry independent of some distinct 
kind of poem. Nor should we ; though we might include 
in the genus, as separate forms, certain kinds of lyric 
poems which he would doubtless include, not under 
poetry, but music. Through a confusion of thought 
which he escapes, we often loosely speak of imaginative 
literature as comprising ‘ poetry and the drama’— as 


INTRODUCTION Xxiil 


if the drama were not poetry — when we probably ought 
to say ‘lyrical, narrative, and dramatic poetry’. Or we 
carelessly talk of “a dramatic poem’, when we actually 
mean, not comedy or tragedy, but something short of 
it — a narrative poem, for example, verging upon drama, 
but not fully realizing either form. One thinks of cer- 
tain works of Browning which are neither truly narra- 
tive nor truly dramatic poems (that is, dramas), but in 
a confused way represent both types. Here one must 
try to discover which of two or three types is uppermost 
in the poet’s mind, decide whether it fulfils the purpose 
of an epic, or of some other kind of poetry, and judge 
accordingly. The work must either be a poem, or not 
a poem; if it is poetry, it must be some species of 
poetry, or else a hybrid. 

2. Aristotle was the son of a physician, and, though 
he took all knowledge for his province, had himself a 
special or hereditary interest in medicine. That his 
thinking in the /oe¢ics is tinctured by this interest is 
clear from his conception of tragedy as a purgative of 
distressing emotions. But there are not a few more 
casual allusions to the same department of knowledge. 
Early in the treatise, Empedocles is referred to as one 
who threw the facts of medicine into verse, but did not 
thereby become a poet; yet when Aristotle reaches the 
subject of diction in poetry, he cites figures of speech, on 
blood-letting and the use of the knife, from this same 
medical versifier. On one occasion, he mentions a riddle 
descriptive of a doctor cupping a patient; on another, 
he recalls the parallel lines in Aeschylus and Euripides 
on the wounded foot of Philoctetes. Again, a faulty 


XX1V INTRODUCTION 


arrangement or disturbance in the parts of a tragedy re- 
minds him of the dislocation of joints and the singular 
appearance of the whole body when a limb is out of place. 

His interest in medicine, however, is subordinate to 
his studies in the wider subject of zodlogy, and to his 
occupation with biology in the most general sense. 
Since he compiled an encyclopedic work on animals 
that even now is instructive, we are not astonished at 
his dwelling on the Platonic comparison of a poem to 
a living creature. The form or essential structure is to 
a poem what the soul, or ‘form’ (as he would call it), 
of an animal is to its body. Doubtless this is a concep- 
tion in which the philosophy of Socrates and Plato has 
a common ground with that of Aristotle; it seems to 
be a fundamental conception for all human thought. At 
any rate, there is a fundamental notion in the Aristo- 
telian philosophy that the universe itself must be likened 
to an animal, having the Deity as its principle of life. 
All nature thus becomes a work of art whose soul, or 
form, or creative principle, is God. 

Ey, To Aristotle, then, soul and body are the inner_ 
and outer aspects of one and the same object, so that 
the inmost meaning of a thing is vitally connected with 
its outer manifestation, | According to circumstances, he 
will lay stress upon one aspect or the other. Similarly, 
with him, a given word may have a deeper or a more 
superficial meaning. Thus the amartia, or short- 
coming, in the tragic hero may refer to something within 
the man, or to an outward act, a particular shortcoming 
or case of misjudgment, which brings about his downfall. 
The same is true of the word mzmests, or imitation. 


INTRODUCTION XXV 


4. This word mimesis is likely to cause trouble on a 
first reading of the Poetics. To begin with, it implies, 
but does not signify, the prime activity of the poet, or of 
the artist in the widest sense — what we might call the 
poetic or artistic imagination. It implies the existence 
of this imagination, but does not directly stand for such 
a power. It signifies the copying by the poet or artist 
of the thing he has imagined, the representing of his 
image in a medium — language, or pigments, or musical 
notes — which may be perceived by the senses. This is 
its primary meaning. The poet has his conception of a 
story, or the musician has his conception of a theme, 
and he puts this conception into rhythmical language or 
musical notes. He does not copy the work of another ; 
he imitates or embodies the inner form or soul of his 
own making in an outer medium for the senses of his 
audience. Nor does he copy any work of nature. Thus 
Cicero, speaking of Phidias, says: ‘Neither did this 
artist, when he carved the image of Jupiter or Minerva, 
set before him any one human figure as a pattern which 
he was to copy ; but having a more perfect idea of beauty 
fixed in his mind, this he steadily contemplated, and to 
the imitation of this all his skill and labor were directed.’ * 

So much for the inner meaning of the word. Out- 
wardly, mzmeszs means the result of the poet’s effort, 
the imitation as it at length appears to the senses, the 
finished work of art — Ocdipus the King of Sophocles, 
the statue as Phidias left it, or, let us say, Leonardo’s 
portrait of Mona Lisa. 


1 Translation by Sir Joshua Reynolds, Fifteen Discourses on Art, 
The Third Discourse. 


XXV1 INTRODUCTION 


5. The idea of a transformation of personality, in the 
agents of a drama or an epic, is not entirely alien to the 
Poetics. The opinion frequently is heard that an element 
of difference in the modern from the ancient drama con- 
sists in what we term development of character. Now 
it is true that the scope of a play like A/acbeth or King 
Lear does afford an opportunity for some display of the 
successive stages in the history of a moral deterioration 
or advance in the persons of the drama; though it may 
be questioned whether our interest in this process is not 
more of an intellectual than a truly emotional or artistic 
interest. In any case, the tragic change of fortune, from 
happiness to misery, or the reverse, as described in the 
treatise, must involve a modification in the spirit of the 
hero; and the transformation of will and feeling in 
Creon, Oedipus, and the rest — that is, in the tragedies 
upon which Aristotle’s work is founded —is adequate 
to the end of arousing pity and fear. But we should not 
search in the Poetics for anything on the education of 
the hero beyond his enlightenment with respect to a 
given tragic situation. 

6. It will now be proper to mention the great dis- 
crepancy in the treatise, between the general statement 
that the best tragedy is one with an unhappy ending, 
and the more particular assertion that the best tragic 
situation is the one in which some person is about to 
injure a blood-relative unwittingly, and discovers the 
identity of his intended victim in time to draw back. 
One explanation of the discrepancy I have suggested 
within brackets in the translation (pp. 47, 48). Another is 
that of Professor Bywater, who maintains that Aristotle 


INTRODUCTION XXVii 


is not quite the unerring writer we commonly deem him, 
and is capable of inconsistency in larger as well as 
smaller details. Still another would be that we possibly 
have in the treatise merely the notes of a student, taken 
down from oral delivery. Now it often happens that a 
student records but a part of what is said on one occa- 
sion, and but a part of what is said on another upon 
a similar topic, without the necessary qualifications in 
either case, and in such a way that his notes contain a 
glaring contradiction, though the lecturer may in some 
fashion, tacitly it may be, have provided against an 
inconsistency. 

Still another is this, and I give it because it helps to 
characterize the Poetics as a whole. The method of the 
work, though it leads to sure results in the main, is often 
tentative enough, with a balancing of arguments as in a 
dialogue. Indeed, the treatise is thought to bear some 
relation, we do not know exactly what, to a lost dialogue 
of Aristotle Ox Poets, which may have been an earlier 
production. But for a few indications of the style of a 
lecturer, it would not be impossible to fancy that the 
Poetics itself in some way contained the materials of a 
dialogue, in which discrepant views on poetry were stated 
and discussed. Certainly, as in the discussion pro and 
con of the respective claims of tragedy and the epic in 
Chapter 26, there are signs of the influence of dialectical 
procedure, even though the work were intended as a 
monologue. Bearing this in mind, one might suggest 
an explanation of the difficulty as follows. Aristotle 
doubtless preferred Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, with 
its unhappy ending, and with its other excellences, to 


XXViil INTRODUCTION 


all other tragedies, and was ready to accord the palm to 
this type of poem. But he had, as we may gather from 
the frequent references to Euripides’ /phigenta among 
the Taurians, a very high regard for this latter play, too, 
so that it was one of the examples most often before him 
in his search for the ideal plot; and so soon as he gives 
his attention to this type of drama (in which the deed 
of horror is averted), he is bent upon explaining its 
excellence, if he can find a psychological basis for its 
satisfactory emotional effect. Accordingly, he would 
tend to represent the claims of this type with a good 
deal of skill and force. If he were sufficiently influenced 
by the spirit of the dialogue form, his argument might 
be very deceptive, for he is a Greek and something of 
a casuist. Yet in the end he would throw the balance 
in favor of the play with the unhappy ending; just as 
in Chapter 26, though he makes out a strong case for 
epic poetry, and alludes to the supremacy of Homer, he 
nevertheless decides that tragedy is the higher kind of 
art. This explanation is obviously hypothetical, but not 
entirely out of keeping with the one I have offered in 
the translation. 

Thus much may be said by way of general introduction 
to an English rendering of the Poetics designed for the 
sort of reader I have mentioned in the Preface. If more 
is needed for a student lacking any considerable famil- 
iarity with Greek literature, I may refer him, out of a 
wide choice, to an article on Greek Drama and the 
Dance, by G. Warre Cornish, in the Fortnightly Review 
for February, 1913, and to another, entitled Avzstotle’s 
Views on Music and their Relation to Modern Ideas, 


INTRODUCTION XXix 


by R. H. Bradley, in the Westminster Review of the 
same date. And I cannot forbear to mention as a 
work at once popular, scientific, and indispensable to an 
understanding of the Greek drama, the third edition of 
Haigh’s Zhe Attic Theatre (Clarendon Press, 1907). 
The inspiring volume of Butcher, Avzstotle’s Theory of 
Poetry and Fine Art, is so well known in this country 
that I scarcely need to name it. 


Airy 
Pd 1 
5) WD a 
i 5 
rs vs 
/ ‘ 
a 
Lar 4 
' 
\ 
he in 
4 
- 
; 


" elu ¥ 
hy DAN i eles 
oh Bars od te » i 
Dae Y tat A " ED asi 









ARISTOTLE ON THE ART OF 
bo OF rod bal Non" 


I 


EPIC POETRY AND TRAGEDY, AND COMEDY, 
CONSIDERED IN GENERAL AS FORMS OF 
IMITATIVE ART 


In this work, we propose to discuss the nature of the 
poetic art in general, and to treat of its different species 
in particular, with regard to the essential quality or 
function of each species — which is equivalent to the 
proper and characteristic effect of each upon the trained 
sensibilities of the judicious. Accordingly, we shall ex- 
amine that organic structure of the whole which is indis- 
pensable to the production of an ideally effective poem, 
including the number and nature of the constituent parts, 
together with such other matters as fall within the same 
inquiry respecting form and function. 

[It will be observed that the treatise as it has come 
down to us carries out only a part of what we might 
expect from this program. The work apparently is 
incomplete. It contains, indeed, a discussion of the 
characteristic emotional effect of tragic poetry, that is, 
of tragedy proper and, mainly by implication, such epic 
poems as resemble tragedy in their seriousness ; but it 

I 


CHAPTER 1 


Poetry; its 
Species; their 
Structure and 
Function 


Art is an Im- 
itation or rep- 
resentation 
of an Objeet, 
in a Medium 
chosen by the 
artist 


a ARISTOTLE 


does not explain the effect, emotional or intellectual, of 
comedy. Nor does it treat of the special powers or 
functions of the several kinds of lyric poetry, or of the 
characteristic quality in such works of the poetic imagi- 
nation as the Socratic dialogues of Plato; though there 
is passing allusion both to lyrical forms and the dialogue. 
Lyric poetry Aristotle might have chosen to discuss in 
a work more directly concerned with the art of music ; 
comedy he must have treated at length in a section of 
the present work that is lost. The part that remains 
owes its unity to the emphasis that is laid upon tragedy 
as the highest and typical form of serious poetry. |] 

Turning first to the conception of poetry in general, 
we may follow the natural order, and begin with what 
is fundamental, the principle of artistic imitation. Epic 
Poetry and Tragedy, as well as Comedy and Dithy- 
rambic Poetry, and for the most part the music of the 
flute and lyre, in their general nature are forms of imi- 
tation; that is, they represent, or imitate, something 
through an arrangement of words or notes. But, having 
this in common, that they all are forms of imitation, at 
the same time they differ from one another in three 
respects ; there are differences in : 

(1) The Means by which they imitate — the ‘medium’, 
as for example, language or melody. 

(2) The Objects as these are represented — one art 
may represent the same object as better, and another 
worse, than the object ordinarily is. 

(3) The Manner in which these objects are imitated 
— Tragedy, for example, directly presents the actions 
of men, whereas Epic Poetry relates such actions. 


THE ART OF POETRY 3 


As for the Means, we may instance those who by 
conscious art, or mere habitual practice, represent the 
likenesses of many objects through the medium of line 
and color; or those who for their medium of imitation 
employ the voice. Similarly in the arts that have been 
mentioned above, taken as a group, the imitation of the 
objects is produced in the medium of rhythm and lan- 
guage and melody, these three media being used either 
singly or in certain combinations. Thus in the music 
of the flute or the lyre, the media are melody and 
rhythm combined ; as in any other arts having a similar 
effect —for instance, imitative piping. In the art of 
dancing, the medium is rhythm alone, without melody ; 
for the dancers also represent human character, and 
what men do and undergo; and the medium of this 
imitation is rhythm in bodily movement. 

Now there is an Art, the subject of this general dis- 
cussion, in which the medium of imitation is language 
alone, without melody, and that, too, whether the lan- 
guage be non-metrical or metrical; if it be metrical 
language, there may be one single form of verse, or 
several forms together. For this inclusive art of imita- 
tion in language, common usage up to the present has 
no name; since we have no term that might be applied 
in common to the farcical prose dramas of Sophron or 
Xenarchus and an imaginary dialogue of the traditional 
Socrates. And we should still be at a loss for a com- 
mon term even if the imitation in these cases employed 
the medium of iambic, elegiac, or any other such metre. 
People have a way, it is true, of connecting the word 
Poet, that is, ‘maker’, with the name of one or another 


1. The Means 
An example 
from painting 


From singing 


From instru- 
mental music 


From the art 
of dancing 


An Art whose 
Medium is 
Language 


Verse is not 
the essential 
thing in the 
artistic rep- 
resentation 


+ ARISTOTLE 


kind of verse, so that they talk of ‘elegiac poets’, and 
‘epic’ or hexameter ‘ poets’, as if it were not the prin- 
ciple of imitation that characterized the artist —as if 
one might term them all poets indiscriminately because 
of the metre. The custom is followed even when a 
work on medicine or natural science is brought out in 
verse ; people call the author a poet. But the /iad of 
Homer and the versified natural science of Empedocles 
really have nothing in common save the metre; hence, 
if it is proper to style Homer a poet, Empedocles must 
be classed as a natural scientist rather than a poet. [A 
similar distinction might be drawn between the poetry 
of Wordsworth and the versified botany of Erasmus 
Darwin.] And the same kind of reasoning would hold 
even if an author in his poetic imitation were to include 
every sort of metre, as is actually done in the Centaur 
of Chaeremon, a rhapsody in which all kinds are 
mingled. We could not, for example, term Chaeremon 
an ‘elegiac poet’; yet we must recognize that he falls 
under the general category of the poets. 

[In the foregoing digression on metre, Aristotle 
clearly regards verse, not as essential to poetry, but as 
‘the customary adjunct of the art. It is the principle of 
_ imitation that is essential, and the embodiment in 
metrical or non-metrical language is a secondary con- 
sideration. But it should be remarked that he offers 
no real support to the inference that rhythm in the 
larger sense, as distinguished from metres (which are 
‘species of rhythm’), is of little consequence in poetic 
imitation. The medium of the ‘nameless’ art which 
includes the Dzalogues of Plato and the J/iad of 


THE ART OF POETRY 5 


Homer may be metrical language, or non-metrical, but 
in both cases it is rhythmical. At the same time, he 
does not venture to call ‘a Socratic Dialogue’ a poem, 
or to regard the imaginative art which imitates in non- 
metrical, though perhaps rhythmical, language as 
‘poetry’. The inclusive art, he says, has not yet re- 
ceived a name. At the end of the digression he tacitly 
conforms to the usage of his time, and accepts metre 
as characteristic of poetry. Modern writers, as Shelley, 
are often willing to use the word ‘ poetry’ as a generic 
term covering the rhythmical language of Plato and the 
English Bible as well as the strictly metrical language 
of Homer and Milton. In the German word aichtung 
we have an inclusive term corresponding to Aristotle’s 
general notion of artistic imitation in the medium of 
language. | 

We may turn, then, from these distinctions in the 
arts which employ their several media either singly or 
in combinations of two each, to consider, lastly, certain 
other arts which combine all the media enumerated, 
namely, rhythm, melody, and verse. Such are the arts 
of Dithyrambic and Nomic Poetry, and Tragedy and 
Comedy. But in these, again, there is a difference ; for 
in Dithyrambic and Nomic Poetry all three of the media 
are employed together, whereas in Tragedy and Comedy 
they are brought in separately, one after another. [More 
strictly, there is, in the successive parts of a drama, a 
preponderance of one medium over another. | 
These, then, may be regarded_as the differences in 
the arts so far as concerns the media through which the 
imitation is accomplished. 


Arts that em- 
ploy the three 
media of 
Rhythm, 
Melody, and 
Verse 


CHAPTER 2 


2. The Ob- 
jects: Men in 
Action 


Men either 
above or 
below the 
average 


Or average 
Men 


A correspond- 
ing difference 
in the arts 


6 ARISTOTLE 


Accordingly, we may proceed to the Objects which 
the imitator represents. The primary objects of artistic 
imitation are human beings in action, men performing 
or undergoing something’ [This will be found gener- 
ally true, even where at first glance the objects imitated 
may seem to be other than human, as in the Lyrical 
Ballads of Wordsworth, the /dy//s of Theocritus, or 
the Lzrds of Aristophanes. So also in fables and bes- 
tiaries, the thing primarily imitated is human nature 
acting or being acted upon.} And the agents must be 


“either of a higher or a lower type; for virtually all the 


distinctions in human character are derived from the 
primary distinction between goodness and badness which 
divides the human race. It follows that, in the imitation, 
the agents must be represented as better than we our- 
selves, or worse, or some such men as we. Thus, to 
take an illustration from the painters, Polygnotus de- 
picted men better than the average, Pauson men worse 
than the average, and Dionysius men like ourselves. 
[Similarly, the subjects of Raphael are of a higher 
type, while those of Hogarth are of a lower, and those 
of the Dutch portraitists are near to the average level 
of humanity. ] 

It is clear that each of the modes of imitation we 
have noted will admit of these differences of elevation 
in the Object as imitated, and that each will become a 
separate art through this difference in representing the 
object as higher, or lower, or midway between the two 
extremes. Such diversities are possible even in dancing 
and flute-playing and lyre-playing. And they are pos- 
sible also in the art, hitherto nameless, which employs 


THE ART OF POETRY 7 


metrical or non-metrical language, without melody, as 
its medium. [That is, they are possible in dichtung.] 
Thus the agents represented by Homer are better than 
we; the agents in the epic of the commonplace by 
Cleophon are on the average level; and those in the 
mock-heroic travesty of Homer by Hegemon of Thasos 
—who was the first to engage in the literature of 
parody — are below the average, as are the personages 
in the mock-heroic Dzliad of Nicochares. [Similarly, 
the knights in Spenser’s Faerie Queene are agents of 
a higher type; the monks in Frere’s King Arthur and 
His Round Table are of a lower type; and the agents 
in the modern realistic novel for the most part are per- 
sons like ourselves.] The same distinction holds good 
in Dithyrambs and Nomes — for example, in the higher 
types represented by. . . [the name is missing] and the 
lower types of Argas; and it is illustrated by the differ- 
ence in the treatment of Polyphemus by Timotheus, 
who elevated the type, and Philoxenus, who rendered 
the Cyclops ignoble. Now, so far as the objects of the 
imitation are concerned, the nobility of the agents is 
what distinguishes Tragedy from Comedy. Comedy 
tends to represent the agents as worse, and Tragedy as 
better than the men of the present day. 

There is yet a third difference in these several arts, 
touching the Manner in which each kind of Object is 
imitated ; for the Manner may vary in three ways. Let 
us suppose three cases in which the object of the imita- 
tion'remains the same (say, heroic men in action), and 
the medium also (say, metrical language). Under these 
conditions, (1) the poet may produce his imitation by 


Herein we 
have one dif- 
ference 
between 
Tragedy and 
Comedy 


CHAPTER 3 


3. The 
Manner 


8 ARISTOTLE 


speaking now in narrative, and now in an assumed réle, 
as Homer does; or (2) he may continue speaking 
throughout in the same person, without change; or 
(3) the whole story may be represented in the form 
of an action carried on by several persons as in real 
life. 
There are, then, as was said at the beginning, these 
three differences by which the several kinds of artistic 
Asummary jmitation are distinguished : a difference in the medium 
of the differ- 
ences of imitation ; a difference in the objects; and a differ- 
ence in the manner. The distinction enables us to 
point out corresponding lines of similarity in certain 
kinds of art. Thus, in respect to the objects repre- 
Suggesting sented, the dramatist Sophocles is akin to the epic 


similarity in poet Homer, for both of them represent agents of a 


the leadin : . POR Ay 
Tragic, Epic, higher type; and in respect to the manner of imitation, 


au the tragedies of Sophocles are akin to the comedies of 
Aristophanes, since both poets present the agents di- 

rectly as experiencing and doing in person. Indeed, 

Digression on according to the Dorians— who base their opinion on 
Nirah een a linguistic grounds — herein lies the reason why come- 
alleged origins dies and tragedies are called ‘dramas’, namely, because 
Traseay> in both kinds of poetry men are represented as act- 
ing (drontes, from the verb advan). Hence also the 

- Dorians lay claim to the invention of Tragedy as well 

as Comedy; for Comedy is clairned by the Megarians 

(= Dorians) — by those of Greece, who contend that it 

arose among them at the time when Megara became a 
democracy, and on the other hand by the Megarians of 

Sicily, on the ground that the first true comic poet, 


Epicharmus, was a Sicilian who lived much earlier 


THE ART OF POETRY 9 


than the Attic comic poets Chionides and Magnes; 
and Tragedy likewise is claimed by certain of the 
Dorians in the Peloponnese (i.e., the Sicyonians). Now 
these claims are put forward as resting upon the ety- 
mology of the words comedy and drama. Their term 
for rural hamlets, the Dorians say, is not demes, as 
with the Athenians, but comae; and they assume that 
comedians acquired their name, not from comazein, ‘to 
revel’, but from their habit of strolling about from vil- 
lage to village (cata comas), when a lack of apprecia- 
tion forced them out of the city. As for the etymology 
of ‘drama’, they allege that the Dorian word for ‘to 
act’ is not prattezm, as with the Athenians, but dvan. 
[It is to be observed that Aristotle neither accepts nor 
censures the argument of ‘the Dorians’. Just before 
mentioning it, he uses participial forms of both dranx 
and prattein together, in order to emphasize the thought 
that men in action, whether doing or suffering, are 
alike essential to both kinds of drama. In his subse- 
quent definition of Tragedy, he uses the participle of 
dran when he describes the manner of imitation as ‘in 
the form of action’.— He does not suggest an ety- 
mology for ‘tragedy’. The Greek word is compounded 
of elements signifying ‘ goat-song’, that is, a perform- 
ance by men disguised as satyrs. — Notwithstanding 
the assumption of the Dorians, ‘comedy’ seems to be 
connected by derivation with the word comazein, ‘to 
revel’, and with the Comus, or wandering dance of the 
Phallic worshippers. | 

Let this suffice, then, on the number and nature of 
the differences in the various kinds of artistic imitation. 


CHAPTER 4 


Poetry has 
its origin in 
two natural 
instincts 


1. The im- 
pulse to imi- 
tate 


2. The natu- 
ral delight in 
the results 


The pleasure 
in the process 
of recognition 


There is also 
a natural in- 
stinct for 
harmony and 
rhythm 


IO ARISTOTLE 


As to its general origin, we may say that Poetry has _ 
sprung from two causes, each of them a thing inherent 
in human nature. The first is the habit of imitation ; 
for to imitate is instinctive with mankind; and man is 
superior to the other animals, for one thing, in that he 
is the most imitative of creatures, and learns at first by 
imitation. Secondly, all men take a natural pleasure in 
the products of imitation — a pleasure to which the facts _ 
of experience bear witness ; for even when the original 
objects are repulsive, as the most objectionable of the 
lower animals, or dead bodies, we still delight to con- 
template their forms as represented in a picture with 
the utmost fidelity. [One is reminded of the corpse in 
Rembrandt’s painting, ‘The Lesson in Anatomy’.] 
The explanation of this delight lies in a further char- 
acteristic of our species, the appetite for learning; for 
among human pleasures that of learning is the keenest 
— not only to the scholarly, but to the rest of mankind 
as well, no matter how limited their capacity. Accord- 
ingly, the reason why men delight in a picture is that 
in the act of contemplating it they are acquiring knowl- 
edge and drawing inferences —as when they exclaim : 
‘Why, that is so and so!’ Consequently, if one does 
not happen to have seen the original, any pleasure that 
arises from the picture will be due, not to the imitation 
as such, but to the execution, or the coloring, or some 
similar cause. 

To imitate, then, is natural in us as men; just as our 
sense of musical harmony and our sense of rhythm are 
natural — and it is to be noted that metre plainly falls 
under the general head of rhythm. In the beginning, 


THE ART OF POETRY II 


therefore, being possessed of these natural endowments, 
men originated poetry, the process of generation com- 
ing about by gradual and, in the main, slight advances 
upon the first naive improvisations. So much for the 
origin of the art in general. 

More particularly, now, Poetry broke up into two 
varieties, corresponding to a difference of personal 
character in the authors; for the graver spirits would 
represent noble actions, while the meaner would repre- 
sent the doings of the ignoble. And whereas others 
composed hymns and panegyrics, the latter sort at first 
produced lampoons. We are unable, it is true, to men- 
tion a poem in the satirical vein by any of the poets 
before Homer, though there probably were many sa- 
tirists among them. But from Homer down, we can 
name various instances of satirical poetry—for ex- 
ample, the Homeric J/argites, and similar works of 
other poets. In the early satirical poems, its inherent 
suitability brought into use an iambic metre; and the 
reason why we employ the term ‘iambic’ for satirical 
to-day is that these poets formerly lampooned, or 
‘jambized’, one another in this metre. Of the early 
poets, accordingly, some became writers of iambic 
verse, and others of heroic. 

But Homer, who shared in both tendencies, was 
superior to the other poets of either class. As for his 
supremacy in the serious style, he stands alone, not 
only through the general excellence of his imitations, 
but through their dramatic quality as well; for he 
makes his personages live before us. So also was he 
superior in the comic vein, since he first marked out 


Two main 
varieties of 
poetry 


Origin of iam- 
bic satire 


Homer ex- 
celled both 
in the seriouw 
and in the 
comic vein 


Evolution of 


Tragedy 


12 ARISTOTLE 


the general lines of Comedy, by rendering the ludicrous 
—and not personal satire — dramatic; for his mock- 
heroic /argites stands in the same relation to Comedy 
as the /izad and Odyssey to Tragedy. 

When Tragedy and Comedy came into existence, 
however, those poets whose natural bent was toward 
lower subjects no longer took up lampooning, but be- 
came writers of comedy; and the graver spirits no 
longer became epic poets, but producers of tragedy. 
And the reason was that these newer forms were 
grander, and were held in greater esteem. 

[Assuming, now, that Tragedy as a whole has reached 
the stage of a complete artistic form, Aristotle dis- 
misses any question as to the completeness or incom- 
pleteness of development in the various constituent 
parts.] Whether in respect to its formative elements 
Tragedy has developed as far as need be, would con- 
stitute a separate inquiry; the question would have to 
be decided in and for itself, and also in relation to the 
theatres. [The investigation suggested by Aristotle 
might involve a study, for example, of the develop- 
ment of the Chorus: had the function of this been 
curtailed as far as might be, considering its original 
importance, and as far as need be, considering the 
right way of presenting a tragedy before an audience ?] 

Tragedy at all events originated in improvisations, 
as did Comedy also; for Tragedy goes back to the 
improvising poet-leaders in the dithyrambic chorus of 
satyrs ; and Comedy to the leaders of the Phallic song 
and dance, the performance of which is still to be 
found as a custom in many of the cities. And from this 


THE ART OF POETRY 13 


beginning, Tragedy progressed little by little, as the suc- 
cessive authors gradually improved upon what preceded 
them. Finally the development ceased, when Tragedy, 
through a long series of changes, had attained to 
its natural form. The principal changes were three. 
(1) From the single spokesman of the primitive form, 
Aeschylus increased the number of actors to two [we 
must bear in mind that one actor might take several 
parts in a play]; he diminished the part taken by the 
Chorus —that is, he reduced the amount of choral 
chanting ; and he made the spoken dialogue the chief 
element in the play. (2) Sophocles brought about the 
innovation of three actors, and was the first to make 
use of painted scenery. (3) Furthermore, there was a 
change in the magnitude of the action represented ; 
for the little plots of the primitive form were abandoned; 
and, with its development out of the satyr-dance, Tragedy 
also discarded the grotesque early diction. Thus, at a 
late period however, it assumed its characteristic eleva- 
tion of tone. At the same time, the trochaic tetrameter 
gave way to an iambic measure. Indeed, the reason 
for the early use of the trochaic tetrameter was that 
Tragedy retained its connection with satyrs, and was 
more nearly allied to choral dancing than at present. 
But so soon as the element of spoken discourse entered 
in, nature herself suggested the appropriate metre — 
the iambic; for this is the readiest metre in speaking, 
as may be seen in ordinary conversation, where we are 
apt to fall into an iambic measure. [That something 
similar is true in English one may discover by listening 
for an iambic beat in everyday speech.] On the other 


Innovations 
of Aeschylus 


Of Sophocles 


A gain in 
scope and 
dignity 


A more suit- 
able metre : 
the iambic 


Fourth, a 
group of 
minor 
matters 


CHAPTER 5 


The Agents 
in Comedy, 
and the 
nature of the 
Ludicrous 


No data for 
the early 
stages of 
Comedy 


14 ARISTOTLE 


hand, our talk seldom runs into hexameters, and only 
when we depart from our usual cadence. (4) Still 
another change was the increase in the number of epi- 
sodes constituting the action. But as to this and the 
other, adventitious, embellishments of Tragedy, and 
their traditional origin, let the general account which 
has been given be regarded as including them; for 
very likely it would prove a long task to follow all 
these matters out in detail. [The history of the tragic 
costume might be one of the things which Aristotle 
here refuses to discuss. A moment later he is reminded 
of the comic mask. ] 

As for Comedy, this, as we have said, is an artistic 
imitation of men of an inferior moral bent; faulty, 
however, not in any or every way, but only in so far as 
their shortcomings are ludicrous ; for the Ludicrous is 
a species or part, not all, of the Ugly. It may be de- 
scribed as that kind of shortcoming and deformity 
which does not strike us as painful, and causes no 
harm to others; a ready example is afforded by the 
comic mask, which is ludicrous, being ugly and dis- 
torted, without any suggestion of pain. 

While the successive changes which Tragedy under- 
went, and the authors of these changes, have not 
escaped notice, there is no record of the early develop- 
ment of Comedy, for the reason that this form of drama 
was not at first seriously regarded as a matter of public 
concern. Not until late in its progress was the comic 
poet provided by the magistrate with a chorus; until 
then the performers were simply unpaid volunteers. 
And it had already taken definite shape by the time we 


THE ART OF POETRY 15 


begin to have a record of those who are termed poets 
in this kind. Who was responsible for the introduction 
of masks, or prologues, or more than one actor — con- 
cerning these and other like details we are in ignorance. 
But we know that the framing of plots was due to Yet two im- 
Epicharmus and Phormis, and hence originated in telnet 
‘Sicily; and that, of Athenian poets, Crates was the 
first to discard personal satire, constructing, instead, 
plots of an impersonal nature and general comic value. 
As we have seen, Epic Poetry has thus much in 
common with Tragedy: it is an imitation, in a lofty 
kind of verse, of serious events. Still there is a differ- Generai ait- 


: : : ‘ hay 424 ferences be- 
ence, on the metrical side, in the medium of imitation, tween the 


as well as a difference in the manner;. for the Epic Tageay 
employs one and the same metre throughout, namely 
the hexameter [whereas Tragedy employs more than 
one metre], and Epic Poetry is in the form of a tale 
that is told, and not, like Tragedy, of an.action directly 
__presented. And there is further a difference in length 
[the Odyssey, for example, contains about eight times 
as many lines as Sophocles’ Ocdipus the King]; for 
the Epic is not restricted to any fixed limit of time. 
[The time that-elapses in the action proper of the //zad 
is about forty-five days, in that of the Odyssey, forty- 
two.] Writers of Tragedy,on the other hand, endeavor 
to represent the action as taking place within a period 
of twenty-four hours (that is, within a period of one 
apparent revolution of the sun), or at all events try to 
avoid exceeding this limit by very much. This dif- 
ference in respect to time exists at present; but at 
first tragic and epic poets were alike in not restricting 


16 ARISTOTLE 


themselves to any special limits. Finally, Epic Poetry 
and Tragedy differ in respect-to their constituent parts.; 
for some parts [four] are common to both forms, and 
some [two] are peculiar to Tragedy (see p. 79). All the 
parts of an Epic are to be found in Tragedy; but not 
all the parts of Tragedy are included in the Epic. It 
Acriticof | follows that a person who can tell what is good or bad 
fat pets Epic art in the composition of a Tragedy can do the same 
ta for Epic Poetry too. 
[Aristotle, as we see, remarks that in practice the 
Greek tragic poets of his own day (seventy years after 
the death of Euripides) try to confine the action within 
certain limits of time. This is a purely scientific obser- 
vation; it is what he finds true in dramas he has 
examined. He neither commends nor censures the 
practice. He is not at this point giving advice either 
to poets or critics. Accordingly, the supposed law or 
rule of ‘the unity of time’, concerning which not a 
little has been heard since the Italian theories of poetry 
in the sixteenth century (followed by Corneille, Racine, 
and others in France), finds slender justification in the 
present treatise. As for its supposed corollary, ‘the 
unity of place’, there is no mention of such a thing in 
Aristotle ; and whatever his contemporaries may have 
done, the elder tragic poets did not invariably con- 
fine the action to one place. In the Humenides of 
Aeschylus, for example, the scene shifts from Delphi 
to Athens; and there is an obvious change of place in 
the Ajax of Sophocles.] 


I] 


TRAGEDY DEFINED. THE PRINCIPLES OF 
ITS CONSTRUCTION 


We are to reserve until later any more extended dis- 
cussion of the Epic, that form of poetry which employs 
hexameter verse, and of Comedy, and are to deal first 
with Tragedy, the main topic of the present treatise. 
As a preliminary, we may frame a definition of the 
essence of Tragedy, in the main by putting together 
things already said. 

_A Tragedy, then, is an artistic imitation of an action 
that is serious, complete in itself, and of an adequate 
magnitude ; so much for the object which is imitated. 
As for the medium, the imitation is produced in lan- 
guage embellished in more than one way, one kind of 
embellishment being introduced separately in one part, 
and another kind in another part of the whole. As for 
the manner, the imitation is itself in the form of an 
action directly presented, not narrated. And as for the 
proper function resulting from the imitation of such an 
object in such a medium-and manner, it is to arouse 
‘the emotions of pity and fear in the audience; and to 
arouse this pity and fear in such a way as to effect that 
special purging off and relief (catharsis) of these two 
emotions which is the characteristic of Tragedy. [Pity 
and fear are two from among the general class of 

17 


CHAPTER 6 


Definition of 
Tragedy 


Explanation 
of ‘embel- 
lished lan- 
guage’ 


18 ARISTOTLE 


disturbing emotions which it is the office of the various 
arts severally to relieve. ] 

By ‘language embellished in more than one way’ 
is meant language which is simply rhythmical or met- 
rical, language which is delivered in recitative, and 
language which is uttered in song. And by the sepa- 
rate introduction of one kind of embellished language 
in one part, and of another kind in another part, is 
meant that some portions of the tragedy (e.g., pro- 
logue and episode) are rendered in verse alone, with- 
out being sung or chanted, and other portions again 
(e.g., parode and stasimon) in the form of singing or 
chanting. [A tragedy being wholly in metrical language, 
the actors as well as the Chorus in delivering it em- 
ployed, by turns, song, speech, and an intermediate 
mode of utterance —‘ recitative ’— like chanting or in- 
toning. The lyrical passages were nearly always sung. 
Passages of iambic trimeter were spoken. Other pas- 
sages were given in recitative to the accompaniment 
of the flute.] 

[The several elements in Aristotle’s definition of 
tragedy are gathered from his previous remarks, as he 
says ; save that hitherto the only possible reference to 
the function of tragedy, its effect upon the audience, 
or reader, is contained in the opening words of the 
treatise, where he promises to discuss the specific func- 
tion of each kind of poetry. In the definition, he 
implies that other forms of art—we might instance 
comedy — have as their special end or pleasure the 
relief of others of the general class of disturbing emo: 
tions to which pity and fear belong. 


THE ART OF POETRY I9 


The effect of tragedy upon the emotions is not 
merely something that took place in a former age, or 
among the Greeks alone; it may be observed at all 
times, and in virtually all persons, including the reader 
of this sentence. However much the malign influence 
of a narrowly intellectual education may check the 
native motions of the heart, few indeed must be they 
who are hopelessly bereft of all pleasure in the tragic 
catharsis. For generations, it is true, there has been a 
debate over the precise meaning one should attach to 
Aristotle's phrase — a debac2 that frequently has turned 
upon the study of words apart from things, and on the 
whole has not been sufficiently concerned with the 
actual experience of audiences, or rather of specially 
qualified judges, during the presentation of good trag- 
edy and immediately thereafter. But if the words of 
Aristotle describe an effect which really occurs, it must 
be that a person of intelligence and normal sympathies 
will undergo, and be able to mark, the experience, not 
only in witnessing the best tragedy, but even in read- 
ing it. The student of the Poetics might render his 
notion of the tragic catharsts more exact by an at- 
tempt to observe his own emotions whea he reads, or 
' re-reads, Sophocles’ Oedipus the King or Shakespeare’s 
Othello. 

Furthermore, one might collect and examine the 
utterances of poets and other men of unusual sensibility 
on the feelings which tragic stories have aroused in 
them ; — not primarily such conscious explanations of 
the Aristotelian catharsis as that of Milton in his pre- 
face to Samson Agonistes. This, though important, is a 


20 ARISTOTLE 


different kind of evidence from the lines in the first of 
Milton’s Latin Elegies — thus translated by Cowper : 

I gaze, and grieve, still cherishing my grief ; 

At times, e’en bitter tears yield sweet relief. 
Similar spontaneous illustrations of the tragic pleasure 
have come from other English poets; for example, 
Wordsworth, in the Dedication preceding Zhe White 


Doe of Kylstone : Pleasing was the smart, 


And the tear precious in compassion shed; 


and Coleridge, in Love: 
She wept with pity and delight. 


It is probable also that a study of emotional suspense 
and its relief in the audience, by an experimental psy- 
chologist, would throw light upon the passage in Aris- 
totle. For the present, however, no explanation could 
prove more helpful to the general reader than a part 
of Bywater’s note, his language being followed almost 
verbatim : | 


In Greek physiology and pathology, catharszs is a very general 
term for a physical clearance or discharge, the removal by art or 
an effort of nature of some bodily product, which, if allowed to 
remain, would cause discomfort or harm. The catharszs of the 
soul as described in the FPodztics of Aristotle is a similar process 
in reference to certain emotions — the tacit assumption being ap- 
parently that the emotions in question are analogous to those 
peccant humors in the body which, according to the ancient hu- 
moral theory of medicine, have to be expelled from the system by 
the appropriate catharsis. With some adaptation of the state- 
ments and hints in /o/¢tics 8. 7, as thus interpreted, it is not 
difficult to recover the outlines at any rate of the Aristotelian 
theory of the cathartic effect of tragedy: Pity and fear are ele- 
ments in human nature, and in some men they are present ina 


THE ART OF POETRY 21 


disquieting degree. With these latter the tragic excitement is a 
necessity ; but it is also in a certain sense good for all. It serves 
as a sort of medicine, producing a cat¢harszs to lighten and relieve 
the soul of the accumulated emotion within it; and as the relief 
is wanted, there is always a harmless pleasure attending the process 
of relief. 

It must be added that pleasure, to Aristotle, signifies, 
not a passive state of being, but a form of activity. 

In his working definition he does not allude to the 
element of pleasure in the tragic relief. As he develops 
his thought, we become aware that the relief is itself a 
form of pleasure; so that the characteristic effect of 
tragedy may be referred to as either one or the other. 
We discover, too, that there are certain satisfactions 
contributory to the main effect ; for example, the pleas- 
ure of discovery or recognition, when we learn the author 
of a deed or the upshot of an incident; the pleasure of 
astonishment, when the outcome of a series of events 
is unexpected, yet is seen to be inevitable; and the 
pleasure derived from ‘embellished language’, that is, 
from the rhythm and music of tragedy. Furthermore, 
the pleasure is explained negatively : the play must not 
offend us with effects that are revolting, or with events 
that run counter to our sense of what is reasonable and 
likely. | 

Advancing now from the synthetic definition of 
Tragedy, we proceed to analyze the elements that sepa- 
rately demand the attention of the tragic poet. Since 
there are dramatis personae who produce the author’s 
imitation of an action, it necessarily follows that (1) every- 
thing pertaining to the appearance of the actors on the 
stage — including costume, scenery, and the like — will 


Six constitu- 
tive elements 
in Tragedy: 


1. Spectacle 


2. Melody 
3. Diction 


The person- 
ality of the 
agents is 
resolved 
into two 
elements: 
4. Ethos 
5. Dianoia 


6. Plot 


22 ARISTOTLE 


constitute an element in the technique of tragedy ; and 
that (2) the composition of the music (' Melody’), and 
(3) the composition in words (‘ Diction ’), will constitute 
two further elements, as Melody and Diction represent 
the medium in which the action is imitated. By Diction 
is meant, in this connection, the fitting together of the 
words in metre ; as for Melody (= ‘Song’), the meaning 
is too obvious to need explanation. 

But furthermore, the original object of the imitation 
is an action of men. In the performance, then, the 
imitation, which is also an action, must be carried on 
by agents, the dvamatis personae. And these agents 
must necessarily be endowed by the poet with certain 
distinctive qualities both of (4) Moral Character (ethos) 
and (5) Intellect (dzanoza) —one might say, of heart 
and head; for it is from a man’s moral bent, and from 
the way in which he reasons, that we are led to ascribe 
goodness or badness, success or failure, to his acts. 
Thus, as there are two natural causes, moral bent and 
thought, of the particular deeds of men, so there are the 
same two natural causes of their success or failure in 
life. And the tragic poet must take cognizance of this. 

Finally, the action which the poet imitates is repre- 
sented in the tragedy by (6) the Fable or Plot. And accord- 
ing to our present distinction, Plot means that synthesis 
of the particular incidents which gives form or being to 
the tragedy as a whole ; whereas Moral Bent is that which 
leads us to characterize the agents as morally right or 
wrong in what they do; and Intellect (or ‘ Thought’) is 


that which shows itself whenever they prove a particular 


point, or, it may be, avouch some general truth, 


mre 


THE ART OF POETRY 23 


In every tragedy, therefore, there are six constitutive 
elements, according to the quality of which we judge the 
excellence of the work as a whole : Plot (6); Moral Dis- 
position (4); Diction (3); Intellect (5); Spectacle (1) ; 
Melody (2). Two of them, Melody and Diction, con- 
cern the medium of imitation ; one, Spectacle, the man- 

_ner ; and three, Plot, Moral Disposition, and Intellect, 
the objects. There can be no other elements. These 
constitutive elements, accordingly, not a few of the tragic 
poets, so to speak, have duly employed [in spite of what 
adverse critics may assert (see p. 62)]; for, indeed, every 
drama must contain certain things that are meant for 
the eye, as well as the elements of Moral Disposition, 
Plot, Diction, Melody, and Intellect. 

[That element of a drama which is here called moral 
bent or disposition (e¢4os) is often rendered into Eng- 
lish by the word ‘character’, There is a danger, which 
Aristotle himself does not always avoid, of confusing 
character in this narrower sense with personality, and 
hence of identifying character with agent. From this 
confusion there often results a misunderstanding of 
Aristotle’s subsequent remarks upon the relative impor- 
tance of plot and moral bent (character in the narrower 
sense). In dealing with this point it is undesirable to refer 
to the dvamatis personae as ‘characters’; one would 
do well to use the word ‘agents’ instead, and to bear 
in mind that the personality of the agents is divided by 
Aristotle into two separate elements, corresponding to 
qualities of heart and head respectively. If at first we 
make the most of this distinction, we shall not go 
far astray in later passages where it is not so carefully 


Summary of 
the six 


Tragedy an 
imitation of 
Action and 
Life 


Relation of 
Plot to the 
End of 
Tragedy 


24 ARISTOTLE 


preserved. What Aristotle next specifically maintains is 
that, among the six elements, plot or action is of greater 
importance than the moral bent of the agents ; he might ~ 
equally well have said it was of greater importance than 
their faculty of reason, i.e., than * Thought ’.] 

The most important of the constitutive elements is 
the Plot, that is, the organization of the incidents of the 
story ; for Tragedy in its essence is an imitation, not of ~ 
men as such, but of action and life, of happiness and 
misery. And happiness and misery are not states of 
being, but forms of activity ; the end for which we live 
is some form of activity, not the realization of a moral 
quality. Men are better or worse, according to their 
moral bent; but they become happy or miserable in 
their actual deeds. In a play, consequently, the agents 
do not perform for the sake of representing their indi- 
vidual dispositions ; rather, the display of moral char- 
acter is included as subsidiary to the things that are 
done. So that the incidents of the action, and the 
structural ordering of these incidents, constitute the end 
and purpose of the tragedy. [This structure is the in- 
ward ‘form’ or essence, which corresponds to the out- 
ward function, the catharsis of pity and fear.] Here, as 
elsewhere, the final purpose is the main thing. 

Such is the importance of this element that, we may 
add, whereas Tragedy cannot exist without action, it is 
possible to construct a tragedy in which the agents have 
no distinctive moral bent. In fact, the works of most of 
the modern tragic poets, from the time of Euripides on, 
are lacking in the element of character. Nor is the de- 
fect confined to tragic poets : it is common among poets 


THE ART OF POETRY 25 


in general. And there is a similar defect among the 
painters —in Zeuxis, for example, as contrasted with 
Polygnotus ; for Polygnotus excels in the representation 
of the ethical element, whereas the pictures of Zeuxis 
are in this respect wholly deficient. [In the same way, 
one might compare the vigorous delineation of ethical 
qualities in Rembrandt with the absence of this power 
in Rubens. Among English poets of all sorts, Chaucer, 
Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth serve to exem- 
plify the presence of this quality ; it is relatively lacking 
in Dryden, Shelley, and Byron.] 

Again, one may string together a series of speeches 
in which the moral bent of the agents is delineated in 
excellent verse and diction, and with excellent order in 
the thoughts, and yet fail to produce the essential effect 
of Tragedy as already described. One is much more 
likely to produce this effect with a tragedy, however de- 
ficient in these respects, if it has a plot —that is, an 


Contempo- 
rary art is 
lacking in 
Ethos 


Success in 
portraiture 
does not pro- 
duce cathar- 
sis. Success 
with the 
action does 


artistic ordering of the incidents. In addition to all this, _ 


the most vital features of Tragedy, by which the inter- 
est and emotions of the audience are most powerfully 
aroused — that is, reversals of fortune, and discoveries 
of the identity of agents— are parts of the plot or 
“action. It is significant, too, that beginners in the art 
become proficient in versification and in the delineation 
of personal traits before they are able to combine the 
incidents of the action into an effective whole. Herein 
the progress of the individual dramatist repeats the his- 
tory of the art; for almost all the early poets succeeded 
better with these two elements than in the formation 
of plots. 


Reversals 
and Discov- 
eries belong 
to the Plot 


Mastery of 
Plot is the 
artist’s final 
attainment 


Compare the 
history of 
the tragicart 


Central 
thought of 
the treatise 


Elements in 
the order of 
importance: 


1. Plot 
2. Ethos 


8. Dianoia 


Ethos and 
Dianoia dif- 
ferentiated 
by their out- 
ward mani- 
festations 


26 ARISTOTLE 


(1) The Plot, then, is the First Principle,.and_as it 
were the very Soul of Tragedy. 

(2) And the element of Character is second in im- 
portance. — There is a parallel in the art of painting: 
the most beautiful colors, laid on with no order, will not 
give as much pleasure as the simplest figure done in 
outline. — Tragedy is an imitation of an action: mainly 
on account of this action does it become, in the second 
place, an imitation of personal agents. 

(3) Third in importance comes the Intellectual ele- 
ment. This corresponds to the power of the agent to 
say what can be said, or what is fitting to be said, in 
a given situation. It is that element in the speeches 
of a drama which is supplied by the study of Politics 
and the art of Rhetoric; for the older tragic poets 
[e.g., Sophocles] made their heroes express themselves 
like statesmen, whereas the modern [including Eurip- 
ides] make theirs use the devices of the rhetoricians. 
[The utterances which Sophocles puts into the mouth 
of Oedipus and Creon are simple and statesmanlike ; 
the opening speech of Dionysus in the Sacchae of 
Euripides is rhetorical. One might also compare the ad- 
dress of Othello to the Duke and Senators with the anti- 
thetical declamation of Dryden’s Aurengzebe on the 
hollowness of life.] This Intellectual element must be 
clearly distinguished from the Ethical element in the 
drama, for the latter includes only such things as reveal 
the moral bias of the agents — their tendency to choose 
or to avoid a certain line of action, in cases where the 
motive is not otherwise evident. Hence the poet has 
no call to employ the ethical element in speeches where 


THE ART OF POETRY 7 y 


the agent is neither choosing nor avoiding a line of 
action. The Intellectual element, on the other hand, is 
manifested in everything the agents say to prove or dis- 
prove a special point, and in every utterance they make 
by way of generalization. [Of course the two elements 
may show themselves in the same passage. However, 
the moral bias of Iago is revealed by Shakespeare when 
Iago resolves upon a monstrous undoing of the Moor. 
And dianoia is manifested when Othello, arguing from 
the false evidence of the handkerchief, infers that Des- 
demona is unfaithful. As for generalizations, adzanoza 
is exemplified in the maxims uttered by various persons 
in Oedipus the King; thus, the Second Messenger: 
‘Those griefs smart worst which are seen to be of our_ 
own choice.’] — 

(4) Next in importance among the four essential 4. Diction 
constituents comes the Diction. This, as has been ex- 
plained, means the interpretation of the sentiments of 
the agents in the form of language, and is essentially 
the same thing whether the language is metrical or not. 
[Compare Wordsworth : ‘ There neither is, nor can be, 
any essential difference between the language of prose 
and metrical composition. ’] 

(5) Of the two elements remaining, Melody is the 5. meloay 
more important, since it occupies the chief place among 
the accessory pleasures of Tragedy. 

(6) The element of Spectacle, though it arouses the 6. Spectacle 
interest of the audience, is last in importance, since it 
demands the lowest order of artistic skill, and is least 
connected with the art of poetry as such. A tragedy can 
produce its effect independently of a stage performance 


CHAPTER 7 


Proper con- 
struction of 
the Plot 


Definitions : 
a Whole 


A Beginning 


An End 


A Middle 


28 ARISTOTLE 


and actors —that is, when it is read; and besides, the 
business of preparing the stage and the actors is the 
affair of the costumer rather than of poets. 

Having thus distinguished the six constitutive ele- 
ments, we are now to discuss, as the first and most im- 
portant consideration in the art of Tragedy, the proper 
organization of the incidents into a plot that will have 
the ideal tragic effect. According to the definition (p.17), 
a tragedy is an imitation of an action that is complete in 
itself, forming a whole of a sufficient magnitude or 
extent; for a thing may be a whole and yet wanting in 
magnitude. 

Now a Whole is that which has (1) a Beginning, 
(2) a Middle, and (3) an End. 

(1) A Beginning (= X) is that which does not itself 
come after anything else in a necessary sequence, but 
after which some other thing (= Y) does naturally exist 
or come to pass. 

(3) An End (= Z), on the contrary, is that which 
naturally comes after something else (= Y) in either a 
necessary or a usual sequence, but has nothing else 
following it. 

(2) A Middle (= Y) is that which naturally comes 
after something else (= X), and is followed by a third 
thing: (74); 

A well-constructed plot, therefore, can neither begin 
nor end where and when the poet happens to like. It 
must conform to the principles just enunciated. [Com- 
pare Socrates in the Phaedvus of Plato: ‘ You will allow 
that every discourse ought to be a living creature, hav: 
ing a body of its own and a head and feet; there 


THE ART OF POETRY 29 


should be a middle, beginning, and end, adapted to one 
another and to the whole ?’] 

And further, as to Magnitude: to be beautiful, a 
living organism, or any other individual thing made up 
of parts, must possess not only an orderly arrangement 
of these parts, but also a proper magnitude ; for beauty 
depends upon these two qualities, size and order. Hence 
an extremely minute creature cannot be beautiful to us; 
for we see the whole in an almost infinitesimal moment 
of time, and lose the pleasure that comes from a dis- 
tinct perception of order in the parts. Nor could a 
creature of vast dimensions be beautiful to us —a beast, 
say, one thousand miles in length ; for in that case the 
eye could not take all of the object in at once — we 
should see the parts, but not the unity of the whole. 
In the same way, then, as an inanimate object made up 
of parts, or a living creature, must be of such a size 
that the parts and the whole may be easily taken in by 
the eye, just so must the plot of a tragedy have a proper 
length, so that the parts and the whole may be easily 
embraced-by the memory. The artificial limits, of course, 
as these are determined by the conditions of stage pres- 
entation, and by the power of attention in an audience, 
do not concern the art of poetry as such. If it were 
necessary to present one hundred tragedies in succes- 
sion [an exaggerated illustration], they would doubtless 
have to be timed with water-clocks —as some say was for- 
merly the custom. The artistic limit, set by the nature 
of the thing itself, is this: So long as the plot is per- 
spicuous throughout, the greater the length of the story, 
the more beautiful will it be on account of its magnitude. 


Plot is like 
the structure 
of a living 
organism 


To be beauti- 
ful, it must 
have magni- 
tude and 
order, yet 
not be too 
large 


The natural 
limit 


Artificial 
limits 


The artistic 
limit 


An adequate 
limit 


CHAPTER 8 


Unity of 
Hero is not 
Unity of Plot 


Examples of 
the mistake 


Homer did 
not make it 


30 ARISTOTLE 


But to define the matter in a general way, an adequate 
limit for the magnitude of the plot is this [ Let the length 
be such that the hero may fall from happiness to mis- 
fortune, or rise from misfortune to happiness, through 
a series of incidents linked together in a probable or 
inevitable sequence. ee 

The Unity of a Plot does not consist, as some sup- 
pose, in having one man as the hero; for the number 
of accidents that befall the individual man is endless, 
and some of them cannot be reduced to unity. So, too, 
during the life of any one man, he performs many 
deeds which cannot be brought together in the form of 
a unified action. We see, therefore, the faulty choice 
of subject in such poets as have written a Heracleid or 
a Thesezd, or the like; they suppose that, since Heracles 
or Theseus was a single person, the story of Heracles 
or Theseus must have unity. [The fault is illustrated 
in Beowulf and in Byron’s Don Juan.| Homer, on the 
contrary, whether by conscious art or native insight, 
evidently understood the correct method, for he excels 
the rest of the epic poets in this as in all other respects. 
Thus, in composing a story of Odysseus, he did not 
make his plot include all that ever happened to Odysseus. 
For example, it befell this hero to receive a gash from 
a boar on Mount Parnassus; and it befell him also to 
feign madness at the time of the mustering against 
Ilium ; but what he suffered in the former case and 
what he did in the latter are incidents between which 
there was no necessary or probable connection. [Hence 
the poet did not join them. — As a matter of fact, the 
first of them has a minor place in the Odyssey (Book 19), 


THE ART OF POETRY 31 


and the second has none.] Instead of joining discon- 
nected incidents, Homer took for the subject of the 
Odyssey an action with the kind of unity here described 
[comprising a sequence of events in the delayed return 
of the hero and his vengeance upon the intruders in his 
house]; and the subject chosen for the //ad is like- 
wise unified. [It is a sequence of events connected with 
the wrath of Achilles. The plot of Paradise Lost also 
is unified.] For, as in the other imitative arts, painting 
and the rest, so in poetry, the object of the imitation 
in each case is a unit ; therefore in an epic or a tragedy, 
the plot, which is an imitation of an action, must repre- 
sent an action that is organically unified, the structural 
order of the incidents being such that transposing or 
removing any one of them will dislocate and disorgan- 
ize the whole. Every part must be necessary, and in its 
_ Place ; for a thing whose presence or absence makes 
no “no perceptible difference is not an organic part of the 
whole. 

From what has been said, it is clear that the office of 
the Poet consists in displaying, not what actually has hap- 
_ pened, but what in a given situation might well happen 
—a sequence of events that is possible in the sense of 
being either credible or inevitable.. In other words, the 
Poet is not a Historian ; for the two differ, not in the 
fact that one writes in metrical, and the other in non- 
metrical, language. For example, you might turn the 
work of Herodotus into verse, and it would still be a 
species of history, with metre no less than without it. 
The essential distinction lies in this, that the Historian 
relates what has happened, and the Poet represents 


Unity like 
that of a liv- 
ing body 


CHAPTER 9 


The Poet 
represents 
Ideal Truth 


He is nota 
Historian 


Poetry more 
philosophic 
than His- 
tory: itis 
Universal 


History deals 
with the 
Particular 


The Univer- 
sal in the 
New Comedy 


32 ARISTOTLE 


what might happen — what is typical. Poetry, there- 
fore, is something more philosophic and of a higher 
seriousness than History; for Poetry tends rather to 
express what is universal, whereas History relates par-_ 
ticular events as such. [Aristotle could hardly have 
forgotten the philosophic element at the beginning of 
Herodotus, or the dramatic organization of events in 
Thucydides; but as he is distinguishing the general 
characteristics of poetry and history, he is bound to 
emphasize the first concern of the historian, namely, 
the actual events of the past and their actual sequence. 
The historian does not neglect the chronological order 
of events when there is no necessary or seeming con- 


‘nection between them; the poet must.] By an_exhi-_ 


bition of what is universal or typical. is.meant the 
representation of what a certain type of person is likely — 
or is bound to say or do in a given situation. This is 
the aim of the Poet, though at the same time he attaches 
the names of specific persons to the types. As distin- 
guished from the universal, the particular, which is the 
subject matter of history, consists of what an actual 
person, Alcibiades or the like, actually did or under- 
went, That Poetry represents the universal has become 
clear enough in the present stage of Comedy [the ‘New 
Comedy’]; for the comic poets first combine plots out 
of probable incidents, and then supply such names for 
the agents as chance to fit the types —in contrast to 
the old iambic lampooners, whose method was to begin 
with particular individuals. 

In Tragedy, however, the poets still keep to the_ 
names of persons [Orestes, Agamemnon, and the like] 


THE ART OF POETRY 33 


who are said to have existed. The reason is that what 
we._accept.as. true _we regard as possible. That which 
never has come to pass we do not necessarily take to 
be possible ; but what we believe to have happened is 
manifestly possible — if it were impossible, it would not 
have occurred. Still, even in Tragedy there are cases 
where only one or two of the personages are familiar, 
the rest having names invented by the poet; and there 
are yet other plays where none of the names are familiar, 
Such is the Aztheus of Agathon, in which both the inci- 
dents and the names were devised by the poet; nor do 
they give less pleasure on that account. Accordingly, in 
his choice of subjects no poet is rigorously bound to adhere 
to the traditional stories upon which tragedies have been 
written. Indeed, it would be absurd to feel so constrained, 
since even such stories as are traditional are familiar to 
but few, and yet give pleasure to any one. [Shakespeare 
for the most part took subjects in some measure tradi- 
tional; for example, Hamlet and Julius Caesar. | 

From all this it is evident that the Poet [the Greek 
word signifies ‘ Maker ’] is a maker of plots more than a 
maker of verses, inasmuch as he is a poet by virtue of 
imitating some object, and the objects he imitates are 
actions. And even if he happens to take a subject from 
history, he is none the less a poet for that; for there is 
nothing to hinder certain actual events from possessing 
the ideal quality of a probable or necessary sequence ; 
and it is by virtue of representing this quality in such 
events that he is their poet. 

Plots and actions, as we shall see, are either Involved 
or Uninvolved, Of the uninvolved, the purely episodic 


The reason 
for particular 
names in 
Tragedy 


More rarely, 
names as 
well as inci- 
dents are 
invented 


The Poet 
primarily 
constructive 


Episodic 
plots are the 
worst 


Pity and 
Fear aroused 
by an unex- 
pected out- 
come having 
an air of 
design 


CHAPTER 10 


34 ARISTOTLE 


plots are the worst, a plot being called ‘ episodic’ when 
there is neither probability nor necessity in the se 
quence of incident. [Such a plot is that of Marlowe’s — 
Doctor Faustus.| A bad poet will construct this kind 
of plot through his own want of insight; a good poet, 
in order to meet the requirements of the actors. Since 
his work must be presented on the stage, and occupy a 
certain length of time, a good poet often stretches out 
the plot beyond its inherent capacity, and by the inser- 
tion of unnecessary matter is forced to distort the 
proper sequence of incident. 

But to proceed with the parts of the definition of 
Tragedy. Tragedy is an imitation not only of a com- 
plete action, but of incidents that arouse pity and fear; 
and such incidents affect us most powerfully when we 
are not expecting them, if at the same time they are 
caused by one another. For we are struck with more 
wonder if we find a causal relation in unexpected tragic 
occurrences than if they came about of themselves and 
in no special sequence ; since even pure coincidences 
seem most marvellous if there is something that looks 
like design in them. For example, while the man who 
had been the cause of Mitys’ death was looking at 
Mitys’ statue in Argos, the statue fell over and killed 
him; such things do not impress people as being the 
result of mere chance. Plots, therefore, that illustrate 
the principle of necessity or probability in the sequence ~ 
of incident are better than others. 

But plots are either Uninvolved or Involved, since 
the actions which are imitated in the plots may readily be 
divided into the same two classes. Now we may call an 


THE ART OF POETRY 35 


action Uninvolved when the incidents follow one another, 
as explained above, in a single continuous movement 
[if there once was a definition (p. 33), it now is missing]; 
that is, when the change of fortune comes to the hero 
without a Reversal of Situation and without a Discovery 
(or identification) of some person or fact at first un- 
recognized. [Such an action is represented in the 
Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus.] An Involved action 
is one in which the change of fortune is attended by 
such Reversal, or by such Discovery, or by both. And 
each of these two incidents should arise from the struc- 
ture of the plot itself ; that is, each should be the neces- 
sary or probable result of the incidents that have gone 
before, and not merely follow them in point of time — 
for in the sequence of events there is a vast difference 
between fost hoc and propter hoc. | 

_A Reversal of Situation is a change in some part of 
the action from one state of affairs to its precise oppo- 
site —as has been said (p. 30), from good fortune to 
ill, or from ill to good; and a change that takes place 
in the manner just described, namely, in a necessary 
or probable sequence of incident. To illustrate: in the 
Ocdipus the King of Sophocles, the Messenger comes 
to cheer Oedipus by removing his fears as to his par- 
entage on his mother’s side, but, by disclosing whose 
son the hero really is, brings about the opposite state 
of affairs for him —that is, brings about the change 
from happiness to misery. [The illustration as the 
treatise gives it does not coincide with the situation in 
Sophocles’ tragedy as we know it. —A reversal may 
constitute the main turning-point of a drama, as in 


Uninvolved 
Plot de- 
scribed 


An Involved 
Plot or Action 


CHAPTER 11 


Reversal or 
Peripetia 


Discovery 
defined 


The best form 
of Discovery 


36 ARISTOTLE 


Macbeth, where the murder of Duncan brings about 
the opposite of what Macbeth intends; or it may be 
subsidiary, as in Kzmg Lear, where the promise of good 
fortune in the coming of the army from France turns to 
further misery for Lear through the defeat of this 
army and the death of Cordelia.] Of the opposite 
change, from misery to happiness, there is an example 
in the Lynceus of Theodectes : when Lynceus is being 
led off to die, and Danaus follows to be his execu- 
tioner, it comes about, as a result of the previous inci- 
dents of the drama, that Lynceus is saved and Danaus 
executed. [Inasmuch as Danaus also suffers a change 
of fortune, this instance likewise illustrates the twofold 
reversal in opposite directions. A similar case in 
Shakespeare is the reversal in Act 4 of The Merchant 
of Venice: here the argument of Portia at first cheers 
Shylock and discourages Antonio, but eventually frees 
Antonio from the dread of death and plunges Shylock 
into misery. | 

A Discovery, as the word itself indicates, is a tran- 
sition from ignorance to knowledge, and hence a passing 
into love or hate on the part of those agents who are 
marked for happiness or misfortune. The best form of 
Discovery is a recognition of the identity of persons, 
attended by reversals of fortune — such a reversal as 
attends the Discovery of Oedipus’ true parentage in the 
Oedipus the King. [A recognition, with a reversal of 
fortune from bad to good, occurs in the Biblical story 
of Joseph, when the Governor of Egypt is revealed to 
the other sons of Jacob as their brother, occasioning 
love between the agents, and a change for the family 


THE ART OF POETRY 37 


of Joseph from misery to happiness.] There are, of 
course, other forms of Discovery besides this; some 
such transition from ignorance to knowledge may come 
about with reference to inanimate, even casual things. 
[A suggested discovery of something trivial is found in 
The Marble Faun of Hawthorne; though one never 
learns whether Donatello had, or had not, pointed ears. ] 
It is also possible to discover whether some person has 
done, or not done, a particular deed [for example, 
whether it was Oedipus who killed Laius]. But the form 
of Discovery most intimately connected with the plot, 
and with the action imitated, is the one we have specially 
mentioned ; for the Discovery bringing love or hate, 
and the Reversal bringing happiness or misery, will 
occasion either pity or fear; and by our definition it is 
these emotions that the tragic imitation is to arouse. 
Furthermore, this kind of Discovery will be instrumen- 
tal in bringing about the happy or unhappy ending of 
the action as a whole. Now since, in this case, the 
Discovery means a recognition of persons [rather than 
objects or deeds], there are two possibilities : (1) X may 
learn the identity of Y, when Y already knows the 
identity of X ; or (2) X and Y may each have to learn 
the identity of the other. [Thus (1) in the Odyssey 
Odysseus knows the identity of Polyphemus; but 
Polyphemus does not know that of Odysseus. The 
hero, however, foolishly reveals his own name to Poly- 
phemus, who is then enabled to call down the wrath of 
Poseidon upon ‘Odysseus, the son of Laertes’. Simi- 
larly, Joseph knew his brethren when they appeared 
in Egypt, but eventually revealed himself to them.] 


Two possi- 
bilities in 
Discovery 


Parts of the 
Plot: 

1. Reversal 
2. Discovery 
3. Suffering 


CHAPTER 12 


Formative 
Elements of 
Tragedy 


Quantitative 
Parts of 
Tragedy 


38 ARISTOTLE 


(2) An example of the second possibility is in Euripi- 
des’ Iphigenia among the Taurians: Iphigenia is made 
known to Orestes through her desire to send a letter 
in her own name to ‘Orestes, son of Agamemnon’; and 
another Discovery is required to reveal Orestes to her. 

Two parts_of the plot, then, Reversal and Discovery, 
represent these things in the action, and have been 
sufficiently explained. A third part is Suffering.[the 
‘moving accident’]: this may be defined as an incident 
of a destructive or painful sort, such as violent death, 
physical agony, woundings, and the like. [In Oedipus 
the King, the suicide of Jocasta, and the blinding of 
Oedipus, self-inflicted, fall under the head of * Suffer- 
ing’; in Othello, the murder of Desdemona, and the 
suicide of the Moor. ] 

Mention previously was made (pp. 21 ff.) of the six 
parts of Tragedy as a whole — those six formative ele- 
ments which are to be used by the poet. We come now 
to the division of a tragedy into its quantitative parts 
—the members that may be separated in the text (see 
p.18). These are: (1) Prologue; (2) Episode; (3) Exode; 
(4) Choric Song; this choral portion being divided into 
(a) Parode and (b) Stasimon. These divisions are com- 


_ mon to all tragedies. [What Aristotle next says of the 


choral portion doubtless applied rather to Greek tragedy 
subsequent to Euripides than to such elder dramatists 
as are known to us.] Though Parode and Stasimon, 
with the other divisions, are common to all, in some 
tragedies only are there (c) Songs from the Stage by 
one or more of the actors (i.e., not by the Chorus), and 
Commoe, or songs by the actors and Chorus together. 


4 


THE ART OF POETRY 39 


~ (1) The Prologue is the entire part of the tragedy 
from the beginning to the Parode of the Chorus. 

(2) An Episode is one of those entire parts of a 
tragedy, each of which intervenes between two whole 
choral songs. 

(3) The Exode is that entire part of a tragedy which 
follows after the last choral song, and reaches to the 
end. 


— (4) Of the choral portion, (a) the Parode is the first 


undivided utterance of the Chorus ; (b) a Stasimon is a 
song of the Chorus, not in anapaestic or trochaic metre ; 
and (c) a Commos is a song of lamentation in which 
the Chorus and one or more actors unite. 

These, then, are the parts into which Tragedy is 
divided quantitatively, or according to its sections. The 
parts which are to be employed as formative elements 
have already been mentioned. 

Following what has been said up to this point (esp. 
pp. 33-38), we must next discuss that ideal structure 
of the plot which will bring about the fullest measure of 
tragic effect. (1) What is the poet to aim at, and what 
is he to avoid, in the construction of his plots? In 
other words, (2) what are the specific sources of the 
tragic catharsis ? 

In the most perfect tragedy, as we have seen (pp. 25, 
34-37), the synthesis of the incidents must be, not 
uninvolved, but involved, and this synthesis must be 
imitative of events that arouse pity and fear — for 
therein lies the distinctive function of this kind of imi- 
tation. When we take this function as a standard, it is 
clear that there are three forms of plot to be avoided. 


CHAPTER 13 


The ideal 
structure for 
the function 
of Tragedy 


Three forms 
of plot to be 
avoided 


Definition of 
Pity 


Of Fear 


A fourth, 
ideal situ- 
ation 


40 ARISTOTLE 


(1) Good and just men are not to be represented as 
falling from happiness into misery ; for such a spectacle 
does not arouse fear or pity in us — it is simply revolt- 
ing. (2) Nor must evil men be represented as rising 
from ill fortune to prosperity ; for this is the most un- 
tragic situation of all. It does not stir our general 
human sympathy, nor arouse tragic pity or tragic fear. 
(3) Nor, again, may an excessively wicked man be 
represented as falling from prosperity into misfortune. 
Such a course of events may arouse in us some measure 
of human sympathy, but not the emotions of pity and 
fear. For, to define: Pity is what we feel at a misfor- 
tune that is out of proportion to the faults of a man; 
and Fear is what we feel when misfortune comes upon 
one like ourselves. Now the excessively wicked man 


deserves misery in proportion; and since his wicked- 


ness exceeds the average, he is not like one of our- 
selves. Accordingly, in this third situation there is 
nothing to arouse either pity or fear. There remains, 
then, (4) the case of the man intermediate between 
these extremes: a man not superlatively good and just, 
nor yet one whose misfortune comes about through vice 
and depravity ; but a man who is brought low through 
some error of judgment or shortcoming, one from the 
number of the highly renowned and prosperous — such 
a person as Oedipus of the line of Thebes, Thyestes 
of Pelops’ line, and the eminent men of other noted 
families. 

[For many, the tragic flaw of the hero, described as 
an ‘error of judgment’, or a ‘shortcoming’, needs im- 
mediate illustration. The single Greek word, hamariza, 


THE ART OF POETRY 41 


lays the emphasis upon the want of insight within the 
man, but is elastic enough to mean also the outward 
fault resulting from it. In the Odyssey, Book 1, the 
human frailty which is said to bring sufferings beyond 
the ordinary lot of man is represented in translation by 
‘blindness of heart’. In much the same way, Sophocles 
makes Creon, in Azzzgone, attribute the woes that have 
come upon him and his household to ‘the wretched 
blindness of my counsels’; and the Sophoclean story 
of Oedipus turns upon a certain blindness of impulse, 
which at length is recognized by the hero himself — 
whereupon he puts out his own eyes. 

In general, we have primarily to do with a certain 
moral bent in the hero, toward goodness in the main, 
but undisciplined; hence a shortcoming which tends 
to show itself in faulty action at critical points in his 
career. If right action is the result of sympathetic in- 
sight, as in the poet himself, faulty action in the hero 
may be described as the result of the opposite quality ; 
and this quality will have a dual nature, compounded of 
something in the ‘ head’ and something in the ‘ heart’ 
of the agent — in other words, the quality will be ‘blind- 
ness of heart’. Under this general flaw may be gathered 
the specific flaws of various heroes, for example: ‘the 
wrath of Achilles’ in the /Zad,; the overweening curios- 
ity and presumption of Odysseus in the encounter with 
the Cyclops; ‘Man’s first disobedience’ in Paradise 
Lost; the jealousy of Othello; the ambition of Mac- 
beth; the rashness of Lear. It is this flaw in the inward 
eye which mars the vision of heroes whose penetra- 
tion otherwise is keen, such as Oedipus and Hamlet, 


The single, 
unhappy 
issue is best 


Traditional 
tales of 
tragic down- 
fall 


Euripides’ 
choice of 
unhappy 
endings is 
right 


42 ARISTOTLE 


making their outward activity at critical junctures some- 
times too slow and sometimes too hasty. 

The conception inthe Poetics of the ideal tragic 
hero with his imperfect insight, proper for tragedy, 
may be contrasted with the ideal man of the WVzcoma- 
chean Ethics, whose natural bent has been corrected, 
whose clarity of judgment enables him to perform the 
right action at the right time, and whose career, as a 
result, is likely to be prosperous. ] 

To be perfectly tragic, accordingly, the Plot must 
not, as some hold, have a double issue, fortunate for 
the good, unfortunate for the bad, but a single one. 
And the change of fortune must be, not a rise from 
misery to happiness, but just the contrary, a fall from 
happiness to misery; and this fall must come about, 
not through depravity, but through a serious defect in 
judgment, or shortcoming in conduct, in a person either 
as good as the average of mankind, or better than that 
rather than worse. In support of this view the history 
of the drama itself is significant. In the early days the 
tragic poets were satisfied with any stories that came in 
their way ; but now the practice has narrowed down to 
traditions concerning a few houses, and the best trag- 
edies are founded on the legends of Alemeon, Oedipus, 
Orestes, Meleager, Thyestes, Telephus, and similar 
personages who have been either the movers or the 
victims in some signal overthrow of fortune. From 
practice as well as theory, then, we argue that the 
ideal tragedy will have a plot of this type. Those 
critics, therefore, are in error who blame Euripides for 
adhering to this plan in his tragedies, since many of 


THE ART OF POETRY 43 


them have the unhappy ending. It is, as we have said, 
the correct procedure. And the best proof of its correct- 
ness is this: when they are put upon the stage and 
acted, such plays, if they have been properly worked 
out, are seen to have the most tragic effect ; and Eurip- 
ides, even if his procedure be faulty in every other 
respect [as some maintain], is yet, through the unhappy 
ending, certainly the most tragic of poets on the stage. 

Second in excellence comes the form of construction 
which some of the critics rank first, where the thread 
of the plot is double, as in the Odyssey, and there is a 
happy and an unhappy ending for the better and the 
worse agents respectively. It is rated first, however, 
only through the inability of the general audience to 
endure the highest tragic tension ; for the poets follow 
the general taste, and cater to the wishes of the specta- 
tors. But the pleasure arising from this double structure 
is not the distinctive pleasure of Tragedy. It is rather 
one that belongs to Comedy, where the deadliest of 
legendary foes, like Orestes and Aegisthus, become 
friends, and quit the stage without any one slaying or 
being slain. [Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, and Othello 
furnish examples of the tragic ending. In Zhe Mer- 
chant of Venice we have the double issue for the good 
and bad. In many of Scott’s novels, /vanhoe, for in- 
stance, the author, sharing the weakness of the public, 
avoids the single unhappy ending. Zhe Lride of Lam- 
mermoor, however, is tragic in the Aristotelian sense. ] 

The effect of fear and pity may be produced by means 
that pertain simply to stage presentation [such as the 
dreadful costume and menacing attitudes of the Furies, 


The double 
ending not 
so good 


CHAPTER 14 


Tragic effect 
through 
spectacular 
means is less 
artistic 


The effect is 
psycho- 
physiological 


44 ARISTOTLE 


or the wretched appearance of Telephus, or of Lear in 
the storm]; but it may also arise from the structure and 
incidents of the tragedy, which is the preferable way, 
and is the mark of a better poet. For the Plot should 
be so constructed that, even without help from the eye, 
one who simply hears the play recited must feel the 
chill of fear, and be stirred with pity, at what occurs. 
In fact, these are just the emotions one would feel in 
listening to the story of Oedipus the King [or Othello| 
off the stage. To bring about this emotional effect by 
spectacular means is less a matter of the poetic art, and 
depends upon adventitious assistance. But those who 
employ the means of the stage to produce what strikes 
us as being merely monstrous, without being terrible, 
are absolute strangers to the art of Tragedy; for not 
every kind of pleasure is to be sought from a tragedy, 
but only that specific pleasure which is characteristic of 
this art. 

[Aristotle is passing from the first of the two con. 
siderations mentioned at the beginning of Chapter 13 
(p. 39) to the second ; that is, from the question, What 
is the poet to aim at, and to avoid, in the general con- 
struction of his plots? to the question, What are the 
specific sources of the tragic catharsis? Obviously, 
the questions are interdependent, yet they may be 
distinguished. ] 

Since the pleasure which is characteristic of Tragedy 
comes from the arousing of pity and fear, and since the 
poet must produce this pleasure through an imitation 
of some action, it is clear that the tragic quality must be 
impressed upon the incidents that make up the story. 


THE ART OF POETRY 45 


Let us consider, then, what kinds of occurrence strike us 
as terrible, or rather what kinds of terrible occurrences 
strike us as piteous. When persons are involved in 
some deed of horror, they must be either (1) friends, 
or (2) enemies, or (3) indifferent to one another. Now 
when (2) an enemy injures, or wishes to injure, an 
enemy, there is nothing to arouse our pity either in 
his deed or his intention, except in so far as concerns 
the suffering of the one who is injured. And the same 
is true when (3) the persons are indifferent to each 
other. But when (1) the tragic incident (ie., ° Suffer- 
ing’ —see p. 38) occurs within the circle of Bred who 
are bound by natural ties —when murder or the like is 
done or intended by brother upon brother, son upon 
father, mother upon son, or son upon mother, — pity is 
aroused; and such are the situations the tragic poet 
must look for in the traditional stories. The general 
framework of these stories, then, the poet must not dis- 
turb: Clytaemnestra must be slain by her son Orestes, and 
Eriphyle by her son Alcmeon. At the same time, the 
poet must select for himself from the materials of tradi- 
tion, and he must employ the given materials with skill. 

Let us explain more clearly what is meant by the 
skilful use of material; for example, the tale of a 
deed of violence among friends. This may be treated 
in several ways. The deed may be done, as in the 
early poets, (1) by a person aware of what he is doing, 
to another who knows the identity of the doer, as is 
the case also in Euripides; for he makes Medea kill 
her children with premeditation, while they recognize 
her as their slayer. [Similarly in Shakespeare, Othello 


Specific 
sources of 
Pity and 
Fear 


A deed of 
horror in- 
volving 
blood-rela- 
tions 


The poet is 
to be guided 
by tradition, 
but he must 
select and 
manipulate 
with skill 


Various 
possibilities 


The least 
tragic possi- 
bility 


46 ARISTOTLE 


of set purpose kills his wife, and she recognizes her 
husband as her murderer.] Or the deed may be done 
(2) by persons ignorant of the terrible nature of what 
they are doing, who afterwards discover their relationship 
with the victims ; as Oedipus, in Sophocles’ version of 
the tale, kills a man who he subsequently learns was his 
father. In this case, however, the deed lies outside of 
the drama proper. But it may be included in the drama; 
as Alcmeon unwittingly kills his mother Eriphyle in the 
version of that story by Astydamas ; or as Telegonus in- 
jures his unrecognized father in the Odysseus Wounded 
of (?) Sophocles. Still a third possibility of treatment is 
this: (3) a person meditating some irreparable injury 
to another, unaware of their relationship, may discover 
the identity of his victim in time to avoid the deed. 
[A variation of the first possibility is to intend some 
injury to a near relative whose identity is known, and 
then to draw back from the deed.] This list exhausts 
the possible ways of treating the material.in question ; 
for the deed must either be done, or not done; and the 
persons must either be aware, or not aware, of what they 
are doing. 

Of all the possibilities, the worst is the situation in 
which some one, aware of the relationship, is about to 
do another a deadly injury, and does not do it. The 
situation is revolting to our sense of natural affection ; 
and it is not tragic — pity is not aroused — because the 
intended victim does not suffer. Accordingly, the per- 
sonages of Tragedy do not act in this way save in rare 
instances — as when Haemon, in Sophocles’ Aztigone, 
pursues his father Creon with intent to kill, and then 


THE ART OF POETRY 47 


desists. [In Shakespeare, Hamlet seems about to kill 
his uncle at prayer, and then refrains. This and other 
instances of inaction in the same play are in keeping 
with Hamlet’s ‘moral bent’. Aristotle would distinguish 
between the artistic handling of the incident and the 
wrong choice of such incidents to begin with.] A second 
situation, not so bad, is that in which the victim is 
known, as in the first case, but the act which is in- 
tended is also performed [as in Zhe Libation-Pourers 
of Aeschylus, where Orestes fulfils his purpose of kill- 
ing his mother, Clytaemnestra]. Better yet is the situa- 
tion where the deed is done by a person who does not 
recognize his victim, and discovers the relationship after- 
wards ; for this is not revolting to our sense of natural 
affection, and the Discovery will have the proper effect 
of astounding us. [This is the situation in Oedipus 
the King.| But the best of all is the third of the pos- 
sible methods of treatment. This is exemplified in 
the Cresphontes of Euripides, where Merope is about 
to slay her son, and does not slay him, but discovers 
his identity ; in the same author’s /phigenia among the 
Taurians, where the sister, Iphigenia, is about to sac- 
rifice her brother, Orestes, but discovers who he is 
before it is too late; and in the He//e, where the son 
is on the point of giving up his mother [ ? to the 
enemy], and recognizes her just in time. 

[It is difficult to explain the discrepancy between 
this preference of an imminent horror with a happy 
issue and the equally decided preference in Chapter 13 
(e.g., pp. 42-43) of a plot with an unhappy ending. 
There, it is true, Aristotle was thinking of the course 


A better 
Situation 


A stil 
better one 


The best sit- 
uation of all 


48 ARISTOTLE 


and effect of the tragedy as a whole, and here he is 
thinking of the emotional effect of a specific incident 
within the tragedy; his examples of the various situa- 
tions seem to show that it may or may not be the 
basic incident of the whole work. To have an immi- 
nent horror with a happy issue as the crucial incident 
in a tragedy would seem to be incompatible with an 
unhappy ending of the play as a whole. In the most 
perfect tragedy Aristotle knows, Oedipus the King, 
which yet comes short of the ideal tragedy of the 
Poetics, the basic incident of horror is treated in the 
second-best way, the deed being done in ignorance, and 
the discovery coming later. As the killing of his father 
by Oedipus thus lies among the events anterior to the 
drama proper, the shock to our sense of natural affection 
is diminished, yet the play can end unhappily. |] 

The fact that the traditional stories must be kept as 
they are, and that the deed of horror must preferably 
be treated in one way rather than another, will explain 
why tragedies, as we noted above (p. 42), have come to 
be restricted to the tales of a few families only. In 
searching the old stories for themes, it was through 
fortune rather than art that the poets came to embody 
incidents of this tragic kind in their plots. And for 
want of invention, they are still obliged to have re- 
course to the tales of those families in which such 
deeds of horror occurred. 

In our consideration of tragic effect, enough has now 
been said concerning the proper synthesis of the inci- 
dents in the plot, and the kind of stories to be used as 
materials. 


THE ART OF POETRY 49 


We turn, then, to the moral dispositions of the agents. 
In respect to these, there are four things for the poet 
to aim at. First and foremost, the agents must be 
(1) good, The Ethical element will be present in a 
tragedy if, as was said (pp. 26, 27), by speech or act 
the agents manifest a certain moral bent in what they 
choose to do or avoid; and the efhos will be good if 
the habit of choice is good. [‘Good’ means good. in 
its kind, performing its function, good tor sumeihing. ] 
Such goodness is possible in all types of humanity — 
even in a woman or a slave, though woman is perhaps 
an inferior type, and the slave quite worthless. (2) They 
must be true to type. There is, for example, a type of 
manly valor and eloquence ; but it would be inappropri- 
ate for the poet to represent a woman as valorous in 
this way, or as masterly in argument. (3) Thirdly, they 
must be true to life, which is something different from 
making them good or true to type, as these terms have 
just been defined. (4) Fourthly, they must be consist- 
_ent, true to their own nature throughout the play. Even 
if the original person whom the poet is representing (as 
Achilles) should happen to be inconsistent, and should be 
taken as an example of that type, still the representation 
should be consistently inconsistent. It must have unity. 

The following are illustrations of a failure to observe 
one or other of these four principles. There is an in- 
stance (1) of baseness — a baseness not required by the 
plot — in the person of Menelaus in Euripides’ Orestes ; 
an example (2) of what is unsuitable and untrue to type 
[in this case the manly type] in the lament of Odysseus 
in the Scy//a of (?) Timotheus; and another [in this 


CHAPTER 15 


The Ethos of 
the agents 
must be good 


It must be 
True to Type 


True to Life 


Self-con- 
sistent 


50 ARISTOTLE 


case the feminine type] in the too masterly speech by 
the heroine in Euripides’ Welanippe the Wise; and an 
example [see No. 4, above] of inconsistency in Euripi- 
des’ [phigenia at Aulis. In this, the Iphigenia who at 
first pleads for her life is by no means the same sort of 
individual as the Iphigenia who later is ready to meet 
her death. [No example is given of No. 3, what is un- 
true to real life; the notion of this kind of propriety is 
implicit in the next paragraph. We may add some ex- 
amples of all four defects: (1) of a baseness beyond 
what is necessary for the plot, in the Edmund and Regan 
of King Lear, (2) of what is inappropriate to the manly 
type, in the Richard of Kzng Richard the Second, and 
to the womanly, Aristotle might say, in the clever speech 
of Portia at the trial in Zhe Merchant of Venice; (3) of 
inconsistency, in the Oliver at the beginning and end 
of As You Like [t,; (4) of what is untrue to life, in the 
personages of Shelley’s Cezcz throughout. ] 

As in combining the incidents of the plot, so also in 
representing the character of the agents, the poet must 
seek after a necessary or probable relation between one 


succession of thing and another. That is, a certain kind of person 


must speak or act in a certain fashion as the necessary 
or probable outcome of his inward nature; and thus 
one thing will follow another in a necessary or prob- 
able sequence. — From this it is clear that the solution 
of dramatic situations should come to pass from the 
progress of the story itself; it should not be brought 
about by a mechanical device (like the Deus ex Machina), 
as when Euripides’ J/edea is concluded by the escape 
cf the heroine in an aerial chariot drawn by dragons, or 


THE ART OF POETRY SI 


as in the //tad, Book 2, where the Greeks are withheld 
from a premature homeward voyage through the inter- 
vention of the goddess. These arbitrary devices must be 
reserved for matters lying outside of the drama proper, 
to explain such occurrences in the past as are beyond 
the range of human knowledge (for example, in a pro- 
logue by a god), or such events in the future as need to be 
foretold and announced ; — for we credit the gods with 
seeing all things, both past and future. In the events of 
the drama itself there should be nothing that does not 
square with our reason; but if an irrational element 
cannot be avoided, it must lie outside of the tragedy 
proper, as in the case of Sophocles’ Oedipus the King. 
[Long before the opening of this drama, Oedipus un- 
wittingly killed his father Laius, King of Thebes. On 
reaching Thebes, he was himself made King, unwittingly 
married his own mother, the Queen, and reigned in 
ignorance of the facts for a period of years, this igno- 
rance being essential to the plot. In Aristotle’s view, it 
is ‘improbable’ that Oedipus never should have learned 
the circumstances attending the death of his own prede- 
cessor ; but, lying among the antecedents of the drama 
proper, the irrational element does not obtrude itself 
upon our notice. It may be added that Sophocles repre- 
sents Oedipus as a man who, though astute, has a slug- 
gish mind for obvious things until some external stimulus 
plunges him into an over-hasty investigation. — There 
is an irrational element in the story of the pound of 
flesh in The Merchant of Venice; and to Shakespeare’s 
age it might seem ‘improbable’ that a Jew should be 
- allowed to push his claim for such a bond in open court. 


The place fot 
the supernat. 
ural 


For the 
irrational 


The poet 
must depict 
the tragic 
flaw, yet 
ennoble the 
character 


52 ARISTOTLE 


— After this digression on mechanical artifice and the 
irrational, Aristotle further discusses the proper repre- 
sentation of the agents. | 

Since Tragedy is an imitation of men better than the 
ordinary, it is necessary for the tragic poet to observe 
the method of good portrait-painters; for they reproduce 
the distinctive features of the original, and yet, while 
preserving the likeness of a man, ennoble him in the 
picture. So, too, the poet in imitating men who are 
quick to anger, or are easy-going, or have other infirmi- 
ties of disposition, must represent them as such, and 
yet as kind and honorable. [There is a jotting in the 
Greek text for an example of tragic obstinacy; it has 
been taken to refer to Achilles, who was also ‘ quick to 
anger’, yet noble.] Thus do Agathon and Homer 
represent Achilles. [Compare Ruskin: ‘The main fea- 
tures in the character of Achilles are its intense desire 
of justice and its tenderness of affection. And in that 
bitter song of the //zad, this man, though aided con- 
tinually by the wisest of the gods, and burning with the 
desire of justice in his heart, becomes yet, through ill- 
governed passion, the most unjust of men; and, full of 
the deepest tenderness in his heart, becomes yet, through 
ill-governed passion, the most cruel of men.’ Ruskin, 
we see, changes the emphasis, not only of Aristotle, but 
of the /iad itself, the first word of which is ‘Wrath’. 
Achilles’ obstinate anger, the cause of the main ac- 
tion, is relieved and ennobled by other traits such as 
Ruskin describes. In like manner, Shakespeare depicts 
the jealousy of Othello, but makes him otherwise kind 
and honorable. | 


THE ART OF POETRY 53 


These principles the tragic poet must continually bear 
in mind, and, in addition, such principles of stage effect 
as are necessarily dependent upon the art of poetry [as 
contrasted with the art of the costumer, or the like]; 
since here also it is often possible to make mistakes. 
On this head, however, enough has been said in a work 
already published. [The reference may be to the lost 
dialogue of Aristotle On Poets.| 
The general nature of Discovery has been explained Cuarrer 16 
above (pp. 36-37). We may now examine the several 
species. (1) The first and least artistic kind of Discov- Discovery: 
ery, which at the same time is the one most frequently Sar ai 
employed — owing to a lack of invention in the poets, — 
is recognition by marks or tokens. Of these, some 1. By Marks 
are congenital, such as ‘the spear-head the Earth-born ™ vanes 
have on them’, or bright stars like those that Carcinus 
employs in his 7iyestes—a birth-mark on the shoulder 
of the race of Pelops. Others, again, are acquired after 
birth ; and of this class, some are marks on the body, 
as scars, and some are external tokens, necklaces, etc., 
and things like the ark, in which the sons of Tyro were 
exposed, that brings about the discovery in Sophocles’ 
Tyro. {The objection to these means of recognition lies 
in the fact that they are mechanical devices, and savor 
of the ‘improbable’. The recognition should arise as a 
probable or necessary consequence of the antecedent 
events in the drama. Bodily marks are convincing evi- 
‘dence of identity to a certain type of mind —for exam- 
ple, to doubting Thomas in the New Testament. An 
instance of the use of external tokens is in Zhe Winter's 
Zale: ‘The mantle of Queen Hermione, her jewel 


2. Arbitrary 
Discoveries 
other than 
by tokens 


54 ARISTOTLE 


about the neck of it, the letters of Antigonus found 
with it, which they know to be his character’.] Even 
these marks or tokens, however, may be used by the 
poet in a better way or a worse. Thus the hero in the 
Odyssey is made known, through his scar, in one way 
to the nurse [that is, in the natural course of things, 
when in the Bath Scene she comes to wash the limb], 
and in another way to the herdsmen [that is, in a worse, 
because more arbitrary, fashion, since Odysseus displays 
the scar in order to convince them of his identity]. Those 
discoveries are less artistic in which signs are used as a 
final means of convincement, and so are all such as 
require a formal proof of identity; those are better in 
which the recognition comes about by a natural turn of 
events, as in the Bath Scene. 

The second kind are Discoveries arbitrarily intro- 
duced by the poet [that is, again, not growing out of 
the sequence of events], and for that reason inartistic. 
Thus in /phigenta among the Taurians, Euripides 
simply makes Orestes disclose his own identity; and 
whereas his sister reveals who she is in a natural way, 
by trying to send the letter to Orestes, the latter is 
made to say what the poet wishes, and not what the 
sequence of events might demand. Accordingly, this 
fault is not far removed from the one just mentioned, 
since Orestes could easily have been made to establish 
his identity with tokens also. A similar instance is the 
‘voice of the shuttle’ in Sophocles’ Zereus [by which 
was disclosed the wrong that had been done to Philo- 
mela —an arbitrary disclosure, not arising from the 
antecedent part of the play]. 


THE ART OF POETRY 55 


The third kind is Discovery through the memory, 
when the inward man, stirred by hearing or seeing 
something familiar, is led to display his feelings. For 
example, in the Cyfria of Dicaeogenes, the hero bursts 
into tears when he sees the picture. And in the Zay 
of Alcinous in the Odyssey, when he hears the harper 
chant the adventure of the wooden horse, Odysseus is 
reminded of the past, and weeps; and thus, in both 
cases, there comes about a recognition. [In the case of 
Odysseus, Alcinous, seeing him weep at a tale of the 
heroes at Ilium, inquires, and receives a direct answer, 
concerning his identity. In Book 4 of Paradise Lost, 
Satan, beholding Eden and the glory of the sun, recalls 
his own former happiness and glory, and through ‘the 
bitter memorie of what he was’ becomes disfigured 
with passion ; whereupon ‘his gestures fierce . . . and 
mad demeanor’ are marked by Uriel, eventually leading 
to a recognition of Satan by all the guardian angels. | 

The fourth kind is Discovery by a process of reason- 
ing. One example is in 7he Libation-Pourers of Aes- 
chylus, where Electra in effect argues thus: ‘Some 
one with hair like mine has come; no one has hair like 
mine but Orestes; therefore it is he that has come.’ 
Another is the suggestion made by Polyidus the Sophist 
for the second discovery in /phigenia among the Tau- 
vians ; it would be natural for Orestes to reflect: ‘My 
sister was sacrificed at Aulis, and now it is my lot to 
be sacrificed also’; whereupon Iphigenia would recog- 
nize him as her brother. [In this way, the discovery 
would be brought about, not by a meretricious expedi- 
ent (see p. 54, No. 2), but in a more ‘ probable’ way ; 


3. Discovery 
through 
Memories 


4. Discovery 
by Inference 


56 ARISTOTLE 


still, not as a result of preceding events in this drama. | 
Another is that in the Zydeus of Theodectes, where 
the father says: ‘I who came to find a son, am my- 
self to perish ’— and thus discloses his identity. Still 
another is that in 7ke Daughters of Phineus. In this, 
the women, when they saw the place, inferred what was 
to be their fate: “We were exposed here, and here too 
we are to die.’ [? Whereupon they were recognized. | 

5. Fanciead | Related to Discovery by inference is a kind of ‘ fic- 


Discover o.e ° 
caused by _titious Discovery’ where the poet causes A to be recog- 


‘ception nized by B through the false inference of B [or through 
a logical deception practised upon B by A]. There isa 
case of this in Odysseus with the False Tidings [? 1.e., 
Odysseus in disguise, bringing false tidings of himself], 
where he [? Odysseus in the garb of a Beggar] says: ‘I 
shall know the bow ’— which [? as Beggar] he had not 
seen; but to depict the other person as recognizing 
Odysseus from this is, for the poet, to represent a false 
inference. [Compare what is said (pp. 82-83) on the 
right or poetical way of representing a lie. The form 
of reference to Odysseus with the False Tidings recalls 
Aristotle’s manner of referring to the books or lays of 
the Odyssey, and hence may indicate a lay in some lost 
epic, if not in a lost version of the Odyssey itself. Pos- 
sibly the ‘fictitious’ recognition should be illustrated from 
Book 23 of the Odyssey as we have it, where the hero 
reveals his identity to his doubting spouse. Odysseus 
says in effect: ‘I shall so describe our nuptial bed ’ — 
which as Beggar he had not seen — ‘ that you will know 
it is Odysseus who is speaking.’ His circumstantial 
description of the bed, which he could give if he were 


THE ART OF POETRY 57 


her husband, leads her, not to the legitimate inference 
that he mzgh¢t be her husband, but to the unwarranted 
inference that he mast be. In other words, a recognition 
is effected through a logical fallacy. ] 

But of all Discoveries, the best is the kind that grows 
out of the very nature of the incidents, when an as- 
tounding revelation comes about from probable ante- 
cedents, as in Sophocles’ Oedipus the King. And there 
is an example in /phigenta among the Taurians (when 
his sister is revealed to Orestes), since it is natural she 
should wish to dispatch a letter home. Among the 
discoveries in this class are the only ones that dispense 
with arbitrary indications of identity and necklaces, etc. 
[This is scarcely true.] The next best are those (see 
No. 4) that come about through a process of reasoning. 
[Compare the rest of the passage quoted under No. I 
from The Winter's Tale: ‘The majesty of the creature 
in resemblance of the mother, the affection of nobleness 
which nature shows above her breeding, and many other 
evidences proclaim her with all certainty to be the king’s 
daughter.’ However, the discovery as a whole falls under 
the censure of No. 1.] 

When actually constructing his Plots and elaborating 
them in the Diction, the poet should endeavor as far as 
he can to visualize what he is representing. In this way, 
seeing everything with the utmost vividness, just as if 
he were an actual spectator of the events he is portray- 
ing, he will devise what is suitable, and run the least 
danger of overlooking inconsistencies. The need of such 
a practice is shown by the fault that brought down cen- 
sure upon Carcinus, when he made Amphiaraus return 


6. The best 
form of Dis- 
covery arises 
from the 

action itself 


CHAPTER 17 


Practical 
hints for the 
work of 
composing 


1. How to 
avoid incon- 
gruities in 
the action 


2. How to 
succeed in 

delineating 
emotion 


Two kinds 
of poetic 
temperament 


58 ARISTOTLE | 


from the temple ; an inconsistency which would escape 
the notice of one who was not visualizing. On the stage, 
however, the play was a failure, for the audience took 
offense at the oversight. [It is impossible to explain 
wherein the inconsistency lay. — Bradley has called at- 
tention to the number and grossness of the incongruities 
in King Lear, for example: ‘ Why in the world should 
Gloucester, when expelled from his castle, wander pain- 
fully all the way to Dover, simply in order to destroy 
himself?’ That is to say, perhaps Shakespeare here 
failed to visualize the action. ] 

So far as he is able, the poet should also assume the 
very attitudes and gestures appropriate to the emotions 
of the agents; for among authors with the same natural 
ability, they will be most convincing who themselves 
experience the feelings they represent. The poet who 
himself feels distress or anger will represent distress or 
anger with the most lifelike reality. [Compare Burke: 
‘I have often observed that on mimicking the looks and 
gestures of angry, or placid, or frighted, or daring men, 
I have involuntarily found my mind turned to that pas- 
sion whose appearance I endeavored to imitate; nay, I 
am convinced it is hard to avoid it, though one strove 
to separate the passion from its correspondent gestures.’ ] 
Hence the art of poetry requires either a certain natural 
plasticity in the poet, or else a touch of madness. Poets 
of the first sort readily assume one personality after an- 
other; those of the second involuntarily pass into various 
states of emotional excitement. [This important distinc- 
tion is often neglected in discussions on the nature of 
the poet —as if the poetic temperament were the same 


THE ART OF POETRY 59 


in all. One might instance Shakespeare as a poet of 
the plastic sort, and Marlowe as the kind with a touch 
of madness. ] 

As for the story, whether it be traditional or his own 
invention, the poet should first make a general brief or 
outline of the whole, and then extend this by the inser- 
tion of episodes. How one may take a bird’s-eye view 
of the whole may be illustrated from Euripides’ /p/z- 
genia among the Taurians, the general plan of which 
is this : 


A certain maiden has been offered in sacrifice ; has mysteriously 
vanished from the sight of those who were sacrificing her; and 
has been transported to a foreign land, where it is the custom to 
offer up all strangers to the goddess. Here she is appointed priest- 
ess of this rite. Some time later it chances that the brother of this 
priestess arrives. — The fact, however, that the oracle for a certain 
reason bade him go thither does not lie within the general plan of 
the story, and his design of obedience in coming is outside of the 
drama proper. — Upon his arrival he is seized, and, on the point 
of being sacrificed, reveals his identity; either as Euripides arbi- 
trarily makes him disclose it himself, or, following the suggestion 
of Polyidus, by the not unnatural reflection: ‘As my sister was 
offered in sacrifice, so must I be also’; and so the Discovery leads 
to his preservation. 


When the general outline has been determined, and 
fitting traditional names have been supplied for the 
agents, the next thing is to fill in the scheme with par- 
ticular episodes. Now care must be taken that the epi- 
sodes are appropriate to the action and the agents. In 
Iphigenia among the Taurians, for example, Orestes’ 
fit of madness, leading to his capture, is an appropri- 
ate episode [since it is in keeping with the traditional 


First one 
must make 
an outline 
sketch 


Then fill in 
the episodes 


The plan of 
the Odyssey 


CHAPTER 18 


Complication 
and Dénoue- 
ment 


60 ARISTOTLE 


Orestes pursued by Furies]; and so is the ruse of sav- 
ing his life by pretending that he must be purified of 
his madness before he can be sacrificed. The episodes 
must also be of an appropriate length. In dramas, they 
are short; in the epic, it is they that serve to extend 
the poem. The main plan of the Odyssey, for example, 
is not long: 


A certain man has been absent from home for many years; he 
is dogged by Poseidon; and he is left companionless. Meanwhile, 
affairs at home are in evil case: his substance is being wasted by 
suitors to his wife, who have also formed a conspiracy to kill his 
son. Tempest-tossed, the man himself at length arrives, reveals who 
he is to certain persons, and attacks his enemies, the outcome being 
that he is preserved, and they perish. 


This is the essential argument of the Odyssey ; all the 
rest is in the nature of episode. 

To every tragedy there pertain (1) a Complication 
and (2) an Unravelling, or Déxouement. The incidents 
lying outside of the drama proper, and often certain of 
the incidents within it, form the Complication ; the rest 
of the play constitutes the Déxouement. More speci- 
fically, by Complication is meant everything from the be- 
ginning of the story up to that critical point, the last in 
a series of incidents, out of which comes the change of 
fortune ; by Déxouement, everything from the beginning 
of the change of fortune to the end of the play. In the 
Lynceus of Theodectes, for example, the Complication 
embraces the incidents anterior to the drama proper, the 
seizure of the child Abas, and then the seizure of the 
parents; and the Dénouement extends from the indict- 
ment for murder to the end. [In higenta among the 


THE ART OF POETRY 61 


Taurians the critical point, after which the Dénouement 
begins, is found in the recognition of Orestes by his 
sister. This point in a play, unfortunately, is sometimes 
called the ‘climax’. A much better term is cviszs. The 
crisis in Oedipus the King occurs in the meeting between 
Oedipus, the Herdsman, and the Messenger, at the end 
of which the hero is plunged into misery ; the words of 
the Herdsman to Oedipus in line 1181, ‘ Know that thou 
wast born to misery’, mark the transition precisely. What 
Aristotle says of Complication and Dénouement can sel- 
dom be so exactly applied to the modern drama. Yet in 
Shakespeare and others it is instructive to look for the 
point from which the fortunes of the hero decline or 
rise — for the transition, that is, between what one. calls 
the ‘ Rising’ and the ‘ Falling’ Action; as in Othello, 
aeerrerocene 1, Or Act:3, Scene 3.] 

Four different sources of tragic effect have been dis- 
cussed ; namely : Reversal and Discovery (see pp. 35—38), 
taken together ; the Tragic Incident (i.e., Suffering — 
see pp. 38, 45-47); Moral Bent, or Character, in the 
agents (see pp. 40, 52); and Spectacular Means (see 
pp. 43, 44). Corresponding to the relative prominence of 
one or another of these factors in a play, there are four 
Species of Tragedy: (1) The Involved, where the whole 
play is a Reversal and Recognition [this is substantially 
true of Sophocles’ Electra]. (2) The Tragedy of Suffer- 
ing; for example, the plays having Ajax or Ixion as 
hero. (3) The Tragedy in which the nature of the agents 
is paramount; as Sophocles’ Women of Phthia, and the 
Peleus (?) of the same author. (4) Then there is a fourth 
kind in which the Spectacular element is very important; 


Four Species 
of Tragedy, 
according to 
the Source of 
the Tragic 
Effect 


Tragedy of 
Plot 
Of Suffering 


Of Character 


Of Spectacle 


Unfair de- 
mands of 
contemporary 
critics 


The fair 
basis of com- 
parison is 
mastery of 
plot 


The poet 
must excel 

in the Unrav- 
elling as 

well as in the 
Complication 


62 ARISTOTLE 


as Aeschylus’ Daughters of Phorcys and the Prometheus 
[another satyric drama, probably by Aeschylus —not the 
Prometheus Bound], and all plays having their scene 
laid in Hades. [Where the course of the drama is ‘ un- 
involved ’, not to say ‘ episodic’, any tragic effect a play 
may have is likely to arise from some element other than 
plot — for instance, from the ‘ spectacle’. The principle 
of division being positive, according to the actual source 
of the effect, we must not look for a species of tragedy 
called ‘uninvolved’; yet see p. 79.] In the light of all 
this, one concludes that the poet must do his best to 
combine every element of interest in a tragedy, or, fail- 
ing that, the most effective elements, and as many as 
possible. [Spectacle, of course, is the least important. ] 
The effort is especially desirable at present, because of 
the unfairness of contemporary criticism. Just because 
among his predecessors there have been authors who 
were successful, each of them, in the use of some one 
source of interest, it is expected that the individual poet 
of to-day will surpass them all in their several lines of 
excellence. But in comparing one tragedy with another, 
that is, in pointing out similarities and differences in the 
handling of material, the fairest way is to take the plots 
as a basis of criticism. And this, of course, amounts 
to comparing Complication with Complication, and Dé 
nouement with Dénouement. Many dramatists succeed 
in the Complication, and then fail in the Unravelling. 
[Shakespeare is not always careful in working out the 
latter part of his dramas, especially his comedies — for 
example, in As You Like /t.| But the poet must show 
his mastery of construction in both. 


THE ART OF POETRY 63 


The poet must likewise remember what has been said 
more than once, and not employ an entire epical scheme, 
that is, a multiple story, for the subject of a tragedy. 
One should not, for example, try to dramatize the whole 
story of the /Zzad. In the Epic, owing to its scale, every 
part assumes its proper magnitude ; but when the entire 
thing is reduced to the scale of a drama, the result is 
far below one’s expectations. This is obvious in the ill 
success of those dramatists who have taken everything 
in the downfall of Ilium as the subject of one tragedy, 
and not, like Euripides, a single phase to a play, or the 
entire legend of Niobe, instead of a portion, like Aes- 
chylus ; for they have all either utterly failed, or at best 
made a poor showing on the stage. Even Agathon [who 
has been praised (p. 52) for his delineation of Achilles] 
failed simply on this account. [An objection may be 
lodged against Aztony and Cleopatra on the ground 
that Shakespeare has here compressed materials suffi- 
cient for an epic into a tragedy. Of course the scale of 
plays like this and Azxg Lear is larger than that of 
Attic tragedy. ] 

Contemporary poets, however, show marvellous skill 
in constructing Reversals, and also uninvolved situations, 
with a view to producing the effects they desire, their 
aim being to arouse the tragic emotions and a general 
human sympathy. This sympathy is aroused when a 
hero combining intelligence with villainy, like Sisyphus, 
is outwitted, or when one is brought low who is brave 
and unjust. [Such cases, reminding us of Shakespeare’s 
Richard the Third, are not typical, however — that is, 
in the Aristotelian sense, not ‘ probable ’.] The outcome 


The tragic 
poet must 
avoid a mul- 
tiple story 


Further criti- 
cism of the 
later Greek 
Tragedy 


The poet 
must treat 
the Chorus 
as one of the 
actors 


CHAPTER 19 


On Dianoia, 
consult Aris- 
totle’s work 
on Rhetoric 


64 ARISTOTLE 


is probable only in Agathon’s sense: it is likely, he 
says, that many unlikely things will occur. 

The Chorus should be regarded as one of the actors; 
it should be an integral part of the whole, and take its 
share in the action. The model is the practice of Soph- 
ocles, and not Euripides. In subsequent poets the choral 
songs in a tragedy have no more connection with the 
plot than with that of any other play. Accordingly, at 
the present day, the Chorus sing mere interludes, a 
practice that goes back to Agathon. And yet, what real 
difference is there between introducing a song that is 
foreign to the action and attempting to fit a speech, or 
a whole episode, from one drama into another ? 

The other formative elements of Tragedy (pp. 21-23) 
have now been discussed [especially Plot and Ethos], 
and it remains to speak of Diction and Intellect. 
As for the Intellectual element, we may assume what 
is said of it in the treatise on Rhetoric, to which in- 
quiry the topic more properly belongs. [In that treatise, 
Aristotle says: ‘ Rhetoric may be defined as a faculty 
of discovering all the possible means of persuasion in 
any subject.’] The Intellectual element includes every- 
thing that is to be effected by the language of the agents 
— in their efforts to prove and to refute ; to arouse one 
another’s emotions, such as pity, or fear, or anger, or 
the like; and to exaggerate or to discount the impor- 
tance of things. [One may illustrate thus : Shakespeare 
makes Claudius attempt to prove to Hamlet that his 
grief for his father is obstinate; he makes Iago work 
upon the jealousy of Othello ; Sophocles makes Jocasta 
minimize the importance of calling the Herdsman. 


THE ART OF POETRY 65 


Beneath what Claudius, Iago, and Jocasta say lies the 
Intellectual element. The poet must employ and repre- 
sent it in the right way.] It is evident, too, that the same 
underlying forms of thought must be in operation when- 
ever the poet makes the agents try by their acts to arouse 
pity or alarm in one another, or to give these acts an 
air of importance or naturalness. [If Shakespeare makes 
Hamlet wish his actions to seem strange, then beneath 
what Hamlet does, as well as beneath what he says, lies 
the Intellectual element.] The only difference is that 
the act must produce its effect on the other personages 
without verbal explanation ; whereas if a speech be em- 
ployed, the author must see to it that the effect is pro- 
duced by the agent’s speaking, and that it comes from 
the particular language the agent uses ; for what point 
would there be in having A make a speech if B already 
saw things in the desired light, quite apart from any- 
thing that might be said ? 

Among the subjects of inquiry bearing on Diction, one 
is the Modes of Spoken Utterance, including such mat- 
ters as the difference between a command and a prayer, a 
simple statement and a threat, a question and an answer, 
and so forth. A knowledge of such distinctions, how- 
ever, falls within the province of the interpreter, not of 
the poet, and is the concern of the general theorist on 
some art like Elocution. Whether the poet knows these 
things, or is ignorant of them, they do not directly touch 
his art, nor do they offer any ground for objections that 
are worth considering. For example, why should any 
one find fault with the opening of the /iad: ‘Sing, 
Goddess, of the wrath’, etc. ?—to which Protagoras 


The poet’s 
use of 
Dianoia in 
what the 
agent says 
or does 


Diction 


Remote con- 
siderations 


CHAPTER 20 


Diction 
proper, as 
related to 
the Art of 
Poetry 


The Parts of 
Diction 


1. The Ulti- 
mate Ele- 
ment, or 
Letter 


Vowels, 
Semivowels, 
and Mutes 


66 ARISTOTLE 


objected on the ground that, whereas Homer thinks he 
is uttering a prayer, actually he is giving a command; 
since to bid one do or not do a thing, says Protagoras, 
is an order. We may pass over this inquiry, therefore, 
as pertaining to another art, and not to the art of Poetry. 

The Diction proper, taken as a whole, is made up of 
the following parts. [The list begins with the smallest 
elements and proceeds synthetically to the largest com- 
posite factors of discourse — from the indivisible sound 
and the syllable, to the entire poem considered as a uni- 
fied utterance.] (1) The Ultimate Element (or Letter) ; 
(2) the Primary Combination of ultimate elements (not 
quite a ‘ Syllable’) ; (3) the Connective Particle ; (4) the 
Separative Particle ; (5) the Noun; (6) the Verb; (7) the 
Inflection ; (8) the Speech [or unified Utterance, from 
a phrase to a poem]. 

The Ultimate Element (or Letter) is an indivisible 
sound — not every such sound, but a sound of such a 
nature that it may unite with others of its kind to form 
an intelligible word. The lower animals also utter indi- 
visible sounds, but none that are elementaryin the present 
sense. These elementary sounds are divided into (a) 
Vowels, (b) Semivowels, and (c) Mutes. (a) A Vowel 
is an element having an audible sound without the ad- 
dition of another element. (b) A Semivowei is an ele- 
ment —as S or R—having an audible sound when 
another element is added to it. (c) A Mute is an ele- 
ment —as G or D — having no sound in and for itself, 
but becoming audible by an addition—of elements, that 
is, that have some sound of their own. The elementary 
sounds differ in several ways : (a) they are produced by 


THE ART OF POETRY 67 


different positions of the mouth, or in different parts of 
it; (b) they are aspirated, or not aspirated, or inter- 
mediate ; (c) they are long, or short, or intermediate ; 
and, furthermore, (d) they have an acute, or grave, or 
intermediate stress. A consideration of the details be- 
longs to the theorists on Metre. 

A Syllable is a non-significant sound composed of a 
Mute and a letter having a sound (a Vowel or Semi- 
vowel) ; for the combination GR, without the A, is just 
as truly a syllable as when A is added, in GRA. But 
a consideration of the various forms of the Syllable like- 
wise belongs to the theory of Metre. 

[Aristotle now passes from the indivisible elements 
of spoken sounds, and the primary combinations of these 
in syllables, to higher combinations, the elements of the 
phrase or sentence. These are either particles which 
have no meaning when taken by themselves, or elements, 
such as nouns and verbs, which have a significance of 
their own.] | 

A Connective Particle is (a) a non-significant sound 
— such as men, dé, tot, dé — which neither hinders nor 
causes the formation of one significant sound (expres- 
sion) out of two or more others [e.g., a single clause, or 
the like, out of a noun and a verb], and which, if the 
expression stand by itself, must not be inserted as the 
first word, [When we form the expression Guothi seau- 
ton — ‘ Know thyself’ — the process is neither helped 
nor hindered by the insertion of dé, but if the particle 
be inserted, it must not stand first.] Or it is a non- 
significant sound — like amphi, perz, etc. — with (b) the 
function of combining two or more significant sounds 


Other dif- 
ferences 


2. The Pri- 
mary Com- 
bination 


8. The Con- 
nective Par- 
ticle 


4. The Sepa- 
rative Par- 
ticle 


5. The Noun 
or Name- 
word 


6. The Verb 


7. The In- 
flection 


68 ARISTOTLE 


into one expression [as a preposition serves to unite its 
noun with a verb]. 

A Separative Particle (i.e., sentence-connective and 
disjunctive particle) is a non-significant sound which 
marks the beginning, end, or division of an expression, 
and whose natural place is at either end of the expres- 
sion or in the middle. [We turn now to those elements 
which have a significance in themselves. | 

A Noun [or name-word, including nouns, adjectives, 
etc.] is a composite significant sound, with no reference 
to time, no part of which is significant by itself ; for 
even when a noun is made up of two others, we do not 
attach separate meanings to the parts. For example, 
when we use the name ‘ Theodore’ (‘ god-given’), we 
do not associate the notion of ‘ gift’ with the dovon. 

A Verb is a composite significant sound, no part of 
which is significant by itself any more than the parts of 
a Noun, but which involves the notion of time. Whereas 
a name (‘ Noun’) like ‘man’ or ‘white’ does not indi- 
cate the notion of when, a Verb like ‘ walks’ or ‘has 
walked ’ indicates not only the idea of walking, but, in 
addition, that of time present or past. 

An Inflection of a Noun or Verb is that element by 
which the word means ‘of’ or ‘to’ a thing, and the 
like ; or by which it stands for one or many —as ‘man’ 
or ‘men’; or by which it indicates the mode of utter- 
ance, as in a question ora command. Thus ‘ Did walk ?’ 
or ‘ Walk!’ is an inflection, of the last sort, of the Verb 
‘to walk’, 

A Speech (or unified Utterance) is a composite sig- 
nificant sound, of which at least some of the parts (as 


THE ART OF POETRY 69 


nouns or verbs) are significant in themselves. Such a 
composite utterance is not always made up of Nouns (or 
names) and Verbs; it may, for example, be without a 
Verb, as in the definition of Man: ‘A biped land ani- 
mal.’ However, there will always be a part that stands 
for some person or thing, as ‘Cleon’, in the sentence, 
‘Cleon is walking.’ A Speech (sentence or whole utter- 
ance) may be a unit in either of two ways: (a) it may 
signify one thing; or (b) the unity may be brought 
about through the linking together of more than one 
utterance. Thus the //zad is one utterance through the 
binding together of a number; and the definition of 
Man is a unit because it signifies one thing. 

Nouns (or name-words) are of two kinds, (a) Simple 
and (b) Compound. By Simple are meant those that 
are formed of non-significant elements, as the word ge 
(‘earth’). A Compound noun may be made up of a sig- 
nificant and a non-significant part — though the distinc- 
tion is lost when the parts are united; or it may be 
made up of two parts, both of which, taken by them- 
selves, are significant. A Compound noun may also be 
triple or quadruple, or multiple, in form, like most of 
the amplified (? bombastic) names (? in comedy), such 
as ‘Hermo-caico-xanthus’. [Compare * Poly-machaero- 
plagides ’, in Plautus’ adaptation from the New Comedy 
of Greece. ] 

Whatever the formation, a Noun (or name) is either 
(1) the Current Term for a thing; or (2) a Strange (or 
rare) Word; or (3) a Metaphor ; or (4) an Ornamental 
Word ; or (5) a Newly-coined Word ; or a word that is 
(6) Lengthened, or (7) Curtailed, or (8) Altered. 


8. The 

Speech or 
synthetic 
Utterance 


Two ways of 
regarding 
Unity 


CHAPTER 21 


Nouns or 
Names, 
Their for- 
mation: 
Simple ; 
Compcund 


1. Current 
Terms 


2. Strange 
Words 


3. Metaphor: 
Four Kinds 


70 ARISTOTLE 


By a Current Term is meant the word that is used 
for a thing by the people we know; by a Strange (or 
rare) Word, one that is used in another region. It is 
obvious that the same word may be both Strange and 
Current, though not with reference to the same region. 
The word sigynon (‘lance’), for example, is current in 
Cyprus, but rare at Athens. 

Metaphor consists in the application to one thing of 
the name that belongs to another: (a) the name of the 
genus may be applied to a subordinate species ; (b) the 
name of the species may be applied to the inclusive ge- 
nus ; (c) under the same genus, the name of one species 
may be applied to another ; or (d) there may be a trans- 
ference of names on grounds of analogy (or proportion), 

(a) The transference of a name from the genus to a 
species is illustrated in ‘ Here stands my ship’; for ¢o 
be at anchor is one species of the genus standing. 

(b) That from species to genus, in ‘ Of a truth, fez 
thousand noble deeds hath Odysseus wrought’; where 
ten thousand is a particular large number, used instead 
of a large number in general. 

(c) That from species to species, in ‘With a knife 
of bronze drawing away the life-blood’, and in ‘ Cutting 
with the unwearing bronze’; where the poet (? Emped- 
ocles) uses drawing for cutting, and cutting for draw- 
tng, when both terms are species of the genus removing. 
[The notion may be this: a surgeon cts with a knife, 
and draws blood with a cupping-instrument, blood being 
removed in either case. The medical poet is able to 
substitute either of the two specific words for the other. ] 

(d) By Metaphor formed on the basis of analogy (or 


THE ART OF POETRY 71 


proportion) is meant the case when a second term, B, 
is to a first, A, as a fourth, D, is to a third, C; where- 
upon the fourth term, D, may be substituted for the 
second, B, or the second, B, for the fourth, D. Some- 
times, too, the poet will qualify the metaphorical word 
by adding to it the term (+A or + C) to which the non- 
figurative term is relative. To illustrate: the drinking- 
bowl (B) is to Dionysus (A) as the shield (D) is to 
Ares (C). Accordingly, the bowl (B) may be called the 
shield (D) of Dionysus, and the shield (D) ¢he bowl (B) 
of Ares. Or another illustration: old age (B) is to life (A) 
as evening (D) is to the day (C). Hence one will speak 
of the evening (D) as the old age (B) of the day — or as 
Empedocles does; and of o/d age (B) as the evening (D) 
of life — or as ‘the sunset of life’. In certain cases, the 
language may contain no actual word corresponding to 
one of the terms in the proportion, but the figure never- 
theless will be employed. For example, when a fruit 
casts forth its seed the action is called ‘sowing’, but the 
action of the sun in casting forth its flame has no special 
name. Yet this nameless action (B) is to the sun (A) as 
sowing (D) is to the fruit (C) ; and hence we have the 
expression of the poet, ‘sowzug a god-created flame’. 
There is still another way in which this kind of meta- 
phor may be used. We may substitute one term, B, for 
another, D, and then subtract some characteristic attri- 
bute of B. For example, one might call the shield (D), 
not the bowl (B) of Ares, but ‘the wzneless bowl’. 

[The Ornamental Word is not discussed. It may 
mean the superior or more beautiful word, where there 
is a choice among synonyms. | 


Proportional 
Metaphor 


[4. Ornamen: 
tal Words] 


5. Newly- 
coined Words 


6. Length- 
ened Words 


7. Curtailed 
Words 


8. Altered 
Words 


Gender of 
Nouns 


72 ARISTOTLE 


A Newly-coined Word is one that is wholly unknown 
to any region, and is applied to something by an in- 
‘dividual poet; for there seem to be certain words of 
this origin— as esnyges for ‘horns’, and aveter for 
‘priest’. [Thus Spenser is said to have coined the 
word dlatant.] 

A Lengthened Word is one in which a customary 
short vowel is made long, or in which an extra syllable 
is inserted. Thus foléds is lengthened from folds (the 
short e¢ becoming long); and /é/ézadeo from Péle:dou 
(by change of vowel-length and insertion of syllables). 

A Curtailed Word is one from which some part has 
been removed; for example: 47 (for krtthe), do (for 
doma), and ops, in ‘Mia ginetai amphoteron ops’ (for 
opsis). 

An Altered Word is one in which the poet, having 
left some part unchanged, remodels the rest; for ex- 
ample, dexiteron is altered from dexion in ‘ dexiteron 
cata mazon’,. 

The Nouns (or name-words), whether current, meta- 
phorical, curtailed, or the like, are either Masculine, 
Feminine, or Neuter. All nouns ending in N, R, or 
S, or in combinations of S, that is, Psi (PS) or Xi (KS), 
are masculine. All ending in Eta (E) or Omega (0), 
which are always long, or in A, among the vowels that 
sometimes are long, are feminine. Accordingly, among 
the letters of the alphabet there are just as many mas- 
culine as feminine terminations (that is, three of each); 
for Psi and Xi count as S. No noun ends in a mute 
or in either of the short vowels Epsilon (E) and 
Omicron (O). Only three nouns end in JI, namely, 


THE ART OF POETRY 73 


meli, kommti, and pepert. Five end in Y. The neuters 
end in the vowels that admit of lengthening, or in N, 
Ra Olio: 

In respect to Diction, the ideal for the poet is to be 
clear without being mean. The clearest diction is that 
which is wholly made up of current terms (the ordinary 
words for things), But a style so composed is mean ; 
witness the poetry of Cleophon or Sthenelus, [Some 
of the poetry of Crabbe would furnish another illustra- 
tion. And compare Kipling in ‘The female of the 
species ’, etc.] But the language attains majesty and 
distinction when the poet makes use of terms that are 
less familiar: rare words, metaphors, lengthened forms 
—everything that deviates from the ordinary usage. 
Yet if one composes in a diction of such terms alone, 
the result will be either a riddle or an unnatural jargon 
—a riddle if the language be nothing but metaphors, 
and a jargon if it be nothing but words that are strange 
(dialect words and the like). Indeed, the very essence 
of a riddle consists in describing an actual occurrence 
by an impossible combination of words. Now this can- 
not be done through any arrangement of words in their 
primary meanings, but it can through their metaphorical 
substitutes. For example: ‘A man I saw gluing bronze 
on a man with fire’ [an enigmatical description of 
blood-letting with a vacuum in a cup of bronze], and 
the like. A similar combination of strange words only 
would be a jargon. 

The poet, then, should employ a certain admixture 
of these expressions that deviate from the ordinary ; 
for distinction and elevation of style will result from 


CHAPTER 22 


Choice of 
Words, 

The Ideal is 
Clearness ané 
Distinction 


Not a riddle 
or a jargon 


How to se- 
cure Clear- 
ness; how 
Distinction 


Modifications 
of Usage de- 
fended from 
ridicule 


Use and 
Abuse are 
different 
things 


74 ARISTOTLE 


the use of such means as the strange word, the meta- 
phor, the ornamental word [? the nobler, when there are 
synonyms], and the rest; and clearness will arise from 
such part of the language as is in common use. Very 
important in helping to make the style clear without 
loss of distinction are the lengthened, curtailed, and 
altered forms of words. Their deviation from the cus- 
tomary forms will lend the quality of distinction; and 
the element they have in common with the ordinary 
usage will give clearness. Those critics are in the 
wrong, therefore, who censure such a modification of 
usage, and ridicule the poet for resorting to it —as 
when the elder Euclid said it was easy enough to make 
poetry if they would let you lengthen out words as you 
pleased. So he caricatured the practice in the sentences: 


I saw Epichares a-walking Marathon-wards ; 
and 
Ouk an g’ eramenos ton ekeinou elleboron ,; 


—which he read as verses. [The text of the second 
line is corrupt.}] An obtrusive employment of the 
device of lengthening words becomes, of course, ridicu- 
lous ; but the same thing is true of any similar stylistic 
procedure. The principle of moderation should govern 
the use of every element of diction; for with metaphors 
also, and strange words, and the rest, a like effect will 
ensue if they are used without propriety, and with the 
aim of causing laughter. 

The proper use of lengthened forms is a different 
thing; as may be seen in Epic Poetry, if we take a 
verse and substitute therein the common forms of the 


THE ART OF POETRY. 75 


words. And a similar test should be made with the 
strange word, and with metaphors and the rest. One 
has only to replace them by the terms of ordinary 
usage, and the truth of our remarks will be obvious. 
For example, the same iambic line occurs in Aeschylus 
and Euripides, though in Aeschylus it is commonplace; 
but Euripides, by the substitution of just one word — 
a strange word in place of the ordinary — has rendered 
the line beautiful. Aeschylus in his PAzloctetes makes 
the hero say: 
The cancer that zs eating the flesh of my foot; 


Euripides replaces ‘is eating’ by ‘feasts on’. Or take 
the line uttered by the Cyclops in the Odyssey: 


Lo, now, a dwarf, a man of no worth, and a weakling ; 


and fancy some one reciting it in the terms of ordinary 
usage : 


See, now, a small man, feeble, and unprepossessing. 


Or take the line: 


And placed for him (Odysseus) an unseemly settle and a 
meagre table; 


and suppose it to be read thus: 


And brought him a sorry chair and a small table. 


Or substitute for ‘the sea-beach bellows’, in the //zad, 
‘the beach is roaring’. Again, Ariphrades used to 
ridicule the tragedians for locutions which no one 
would employ in ordinary conversation; for example, 
‘from the house away ’— instead of ‘away from the 
house’; ‘of thee’, instead of ‘yours’; ego de nin, 
instead of ego ad’ auten,; ‘Achilles about’, instead of 


A test of the 
need of devi- 
ations from 

the ordinary 


As in the 
Epic, so in 
Tragedy, 
deviations 
are defensible 


A Command 
of Metaphor 
is the mark 
of genius 


Varieties of 
Diction for 
different 
Metres 


76 ARISTOTLE 


‘about Achilles’; and so on. [Compare Wordsworth: 
‘That glides the dark hills under.’] It is just because 
these expressions are not ordinary that they give 
distinction to the language; and that is the point 
Ariphrades failed to catch. 

It is, indeed, important to make the right use of 
each of the elements mentioned — lengthened, cur- 
tailed, and altered words—as well as of compounds 
and strange words. But most important by far is it to 
have a command of metaphor. This is the one thing 
the poet cannot learn from others. It is the mark of 
genius ; for to coin good metaphors involves an insight 
into the resemblances between objects that are super- 
ficially unlike. 

Of the several kinds we have noted, compound 
words are best adapted to the dithyramb, strange words 
to heroic metre [that is, to epic poetry], and metaphors to 
iambic metre [that is, to the tragic dialogue]. In Heroic 
poetry, it is true, all the special forms may be used. But 
iambic verse, as far as may be, represents the spoken 
language, and hence employs only the kinds of words 
one would use in oratory; that is, the current term, 
the metaphor, and the ornamental (or ? superior) word. 

Herewith we close the discussion of Tragedy, or the 
art of imitation in the form of action. 


III 


EPIC POETRY. THE PRINCIPLES OF ITS 
CONSTRUCTION 


And now for the form of poetry which is purely nar- 
rative, or the art which imitates in metrical language as 
its sole medium. 

In the Epic, as in Tragedy, the story should be con- 
structed on dramatic principles: everything should turn 
about a single action, one that is a whole, and is organ- 
ically perfect — having a beginning, and a middle, and 
an end. In this way, just as a living animal, individual 
and perfect, has its own beauty, so the poem will arouse 
in us its own characteristic form of pleasure. So much 
is obvious from what has gone before. Putting the 
thing negatively, we may say that the plot of an Epic 
must be unlike what we commonly find in histories, 
which of necessity represent, not a single action, but 
some one period, with all that happened therein to 
one or more persons, however unrelated the several 
occurrences may have been. For example: the Battle 
of Salamis took place at the same time as the defeat of 
the Carthaginians in Sicily ; but the two events did not 
converge to the same end. And similarly, one event 
may immediately follow another in point of time, and 
yet there may be no sequence leading to one issue. 
Nevertheless, one may venture to say, most of the 

77 


CHAPTER 23 


What the 
Epic has in 
common with 
Tragedy 


It is nota 
Chronicle 


Homer a 
model in his 
choice of 
subject 


Mistakes in 
choice by 
other Epic 
Poets 


CHAPTER 24 


78 ARISTOTLE 


epic poets commit this very fault of making their plots 
like chronicles. 

In precisely this respect, therefore, Homer, as we 
already have said (p. 30), manifestly transcends the 
other epic poets. Far from taking all the legend of 
Ilium for his theme, he did not attempt to deal even 
with the War in its entirety, although this had a defi- 
nite beginning and end. Very likely he thought that 
the story would be too long to be easily grasped as a 
whole — or, if it were not too long, that it would be too 
complicated from the variety of the incidents. As it is, 
he has selected a single phase of the war for his main 
action, and employs a number of the other incidents by 
way of episode; for example, he diversifies his narra- 
tive with the Catalogue of the Ships, and so forth. Of 
the other epic poets, some take for their subject all the 
deeds of one hero; others all the events in one period ; 
and others a single action, but one with a multiplicity of 
parts. This last is what was done by the author of the 
Cypria, and by the author of the Lztt/e Jad. The con- 
sequence is that the /zad and the Odyssey each furnish 
materials for but a single tragedy, or at most for two; 
while the Cypria supplies subjects for a number; and 
the Little Jad for eight or more: an Award of the 
Arms, a Philoctetes, a Neoptolemus, a Eurypylus, a 
Mendicant Odysseus, a Spartan Women, a Sack of 
Llum, a Sailing of the Fleet — one might add a Sinon 
and a Zrojan Women. 

Furthermore, there must be the same varieties of 
Epic Poetry as of Tragedy. That is, an Epic plot must 
be either (1) Uninvolved or (2) Involved, or the story 


THE ART OF POETRY 79 


must be one (3) of Suffering or (4) of Character. [The 
division corresponds in the last three points with the 
similar division under tragedy (pp. 61-62), but not in 
the first. The epic with an uninvolved plot may rank 
in Aristotle’s mind with the kind of tragedy in which 
the effect is mainly dependent upon ‘Spectacle’, the 
plot being, perhaps, episodic ; otherwise there is a more 
troublesome discrepancy.] The Constituent Parts, also, 
of the Epic must be the same as in Tragedy — save 
that the poet does not use the elements of Melody and 
Spectacle ; for there necessarily are Reversals and Dis- 
coveries and Sufferings in this form of poetry as in that. 
And the Intellectual Processes and the Diction must be 
artistically worked out. These elements were all first 
used by Homer, who laid the proper emphasis on them 
severally ; for each of his poems is a model of construc- 
tion — the //zad of an uninvolved plot and a story of 
tragic suffering ; the Odyssey of an involved plot (since 
there are Discoveries throughout) and a story of char- 
acter. And in addition to these excellences, each of 
the poems surpasses all others in point of Diction and 
Thought. [The excellence in point of ‘Thought’ is 
shown, for example, in the structure of the speeches. 
So much, then, for similarities between the epic and 
tragedy. ] 

But Epic Poetry differs from Tragedy (1) in the length 
of the composition, and (2) in the metre. As for the 
length, an adequate limit has already been suggested 
(pp. 29, 30): it must be possible for us to embrace the 
beginning and end of the story in one view. Now this 
condition would be met if the poem were shorter than 


Four Species 
of Epic 
Poetry 


Constituents 
common to 
the Epic and 
to Tragedy 


The Epic dif- 
fers from 
Tragedy in 
1. Length 


The advan- 
tage of 
Length 


2. Metre: 
the Heroic 


Its advan- 
tage 


380 ARISTOTLE 


the old epics —if it were about as long as one of the 
groups of three tragedies presented for a single hearing. 
[Say, 3500 — 4000 lines in all; the Orestean Trilogy 
of Aeschylus runs to 3795.] But through its capacity 
for extension, Epic Poetry has a great and peculiar 
advantage ; for in a tragedy it is not possible to repre- 
sent a number of incidents in the action as carried on 
simultaneously — the poet is limited to the one thing 
done on the stage by the actors who are there. But in 
the Epic, because of the narrative form, he may repre- 
sent a number of incidents as simultaneous occurrences ; 
and these, if they are relevant to the action, materially 
add to the poem. The increase in bulk tends to the 
advantage of the Epic in grandeur, and in variety of 
interest for the hearer through diversity of incident in 
the episodes. Uniformity of incident quickly satiates 
the audience, and makes tragedies fail on the stage. 
As for the metre, Epic Poetry has appropriated the 
heroic (hexameter verse) as a result of experience. And 
the fitness of this measure might be critically tested ; 
for if any one were to produce a narrative poem in 
another metre, or in several others, the incongruity 
would be obvious. Of all metres, in fact, the heroic is 
the stateliest and most impressive. On this account, it 
most readily admits the use of strange words and meta- 
phors (see p. 76) ; for in its tolerance of forms that are 
out of the ordinary, narrative poetry goes beyond the 
other kinds. The iambic and trochaic measures, on the 
other hand, are the concomitants of motion, the trochaic 
being appropriate to dancing, and the iambic expres- 
sive of life and action. [Accordingly, neither is suited 


THE ART OF POETRY SI 


to the stately epic.] Still more unfitting would it be to 
compose an epic in a hotchpotch of metres after the 
fashion of Chaeremon’s rhapsody. Hence no one ever 
has written a long story in any other metre than the 
heroic. Rather, nature herself, as we have said (cf. p. 13), 
teaches us to select the proper kind of verse for such a 
story. 

Homer, so worthy of praise in other respects, is espe- 
cially admirable in that he alone among epic poets is not 
unaware of the part to be taken by the author himself 
in his work. The poet should, in fact, say as little as 
may be in his own person, since in his personal utter- 
ances he is not an imitative artist. Now the rest of the 
epic poets continually appear in their own works, and 
their snatches of artistic imitation are few and far be- 
tween. But Homer, after a brief preliminary, straight- 
way brings in a man, or a woman, or some other type 
— noone of them vague, but each sharply differentiated. 
[The preliminaries of Milton are longer and more 
personal. | 

Some element of the marvellous unquestionably has a 
place in Tragedy ; but the irrational (or illogical), which 
is the chief factor in the marvellous, and which must so 
far as possible be excluded from Tragedy, is more freely 
admitted in the Epic, since the persons of the story are 
not actually before our eyes. Take the account of the 
pursuit of Hector in the //zad. On the stage, the scene 
would be ridiculous: Achilles running after Hector all 
alone, beneath the walls of Troy; the Grecian warriors 
halting instead of following, and Achilles shaking his 
head to warn them not to throw darts at their foe. 


The Epic 
Poet is not 
to obtrude 
himself in 
his work 


Place of the 
Marvellous, 
and even the 
Irrational, in 
the Epic 


The Marvel- 
lous; why 
people tell 
lies 


How to rep- 
resent a lie 
artistically 


82 ARISTOTLE 


In the narrative, however, since we do not combine the 
circumstances into one picture, the absurdity of the 
situation is not perceived. 

That the marvellous is a source of pleasure may 
be seen by the way in which people add to a story ; for 
they always embellish the facts with striking details, in 
the belief that it will gratify the listeners. Yet it is 
Homer above all who has shown the rest of us how a 
lie ought to be told. The essence of the method is the 
use of a fallacy in reasoning, as follows. Suppose that 
whenever A exists or comes to pass, B must exist or 
occur; men think, if the consequent B exists, the ante- 
cedent A must also — but the inference is illegitimate. 
For the poet, accordingly, the right method is this: if 
the antecedent A is untrue, and if there is something 
else, B, which would necessarily exist or occur if A 
were true, one must add on the B; for, knowing the 
added detail to be true, we ourselves mentally proceed 
to the fallacious inference that the antecedent A is like- 
wise true. We may take an instance from the Bath 
Scene in the Odyssey. [Here, Odysseus, disguised in 
rags, wishes to convince Penelope that he, the Beggar, 
has seen the real Odysseus alive =A, a falsehood. 
Accordingly, he adds an accurate description of the 
hero’s clothing, etc., = B. Penelope knows B to be true, 
since the garments came from her. If A were true, 
that is, if the Beggar had seen Odysseus, the natural 
consequence, B, would be a true description of the 
clothing. From the truth of B, Penelope mistakenly 
infers the occurrence of A, and believes the Beg- 
gar. The illusion, which is partly shared by any one 


THE ART OF POETRY 83 


who hears the story, witnesses to the artistic method 
of the poet.] 

A sequence of events which, though actually impos- 
sible, looks reasonable should be preferred by the poet 
to what, though really possible, seems incredible. The 
story [whether of an epic or a tragedy] should not be 
made up of incidents which are severally improbable ; 
one should rather aim to include no irrational element 
whatsoever. At any rate, if an irrational element is 
unavoidable, it should lie outside of the story proper 
—as the hero’s ignorance in Oedipus the King of the 
way in which Laius met his death. It should not lie 
within the story — like the anachronism in Sophocles’ 
flectra, where a legendary hero is described as being 
killed at the modern Pythian games ; or like the silence 
of (?) Telephus in 7he JZyszans of (?) Aeschylus, where 
the man comes all the way from Tegea to Mysia with- 
out speaking. Accordingly, it is ridiculous for a poet 
to say that his story would be ruined if such incidents 
were left out; he has no business to construct such a 
plot to begin with. But if he does set out to repre- 
sent an irrational incident, and if he obviously could 
have treated it in a way less offensive to our notions 
of probability, his fault is worse than ridiculous, lying 
not in his choice of an object to imitate, but in his art 
as an imitator. In the hands of an inferior poet, how 
manifest and intolerable would the improbabilities be- 
come which we find even in the Odyssey, at the point 
where the hero is set ashore. [Earnestly desiring to 
see his native land, Odysseus nevertheless sleeps from 
the time he leaves the land of the Phaeacians until 


The poet 
should prefer 
a probable 
impossibility 
to an incred- 
ible possi- 
bility 


The Irra- 
tional 


If chosen at 
all, it must 
be treated 
with skill 


As in Homer 


The place of 
Ornate 
Diction 


84 ARISTOTLE 


after they have disembarked him on his own island, 
and gone away ; although ‘the vessel in full course ran 
ashore, half her keel’s length high.’] As it is, Homer 
conceals the absurdity, and renders the incident charm- 
ing, by means of his other excellences [in particular by 
the elaborate description of the nocturnal voyage, and 
of the haven and cave at Ithaca]. 

Elaborate Diction, however, is to be used only when 
the action pauses, and no purposes and arguments of the 
agents are to be displayed. Conversely, where the pur- 
poses and reasonings of the agents need to be revealed, 
a too ornate Diction will obscure them. 


IV 


PROBLEMS IN CRITICISM. THE PRINCIPLES 
OF THEIR SOLUTION 


[Various allusions have been made to the current 
and anterior criticism, more or less unsound, of poets 
and poetry —for example, to the injustice of comparing 
tragedies upon some basis other than the plot, and to 
the ridiculing of the epic poets by the elder Euclid, 
and of tragic diction by Ariphrades. We now come to 
a discussion of the way in which critical objections 
ought really to be formulated, and of the laws by 
which, in special cases, the poet is to be adjudged 
right or wrong. Aristotle is constructive and conserva- 
tive in spirit, and the discussion amounts to a defence 
of poetry, above all, that of Homer, against destructive 
criticism. ] | 

As to Problems in criticism, and the respective Solu- 
tions of them: they rest upon certain underlying prin- 
ciples, and the number and nature of these will be clear 
if we take account of the following considerations. 

(1) The poet, as we have seen, is an imitator, just 
like a painter or any other maker of likenesses [e.g., a 
sculptor]; of necessity, therefore, he must, in all in- 
stances, represent one of three objects (cf. pp. 2, 6) : 
(a) Things as they once were, or are now [historical 


or scientific truth]; (b) Things as they are said or 
85 


CHAPTER 25 


1. Principle 
of the Object 
of the Imita- 
tion 


2. Principle 
of the Me- 
dium 


3. Principle 
of Artistic 
Correctness. 
Poetry has a 
standard of 
its own 


Two kinds of 
errors in 
Poetry 


86 ARISTOTLE 


thought to be [tradition and common belief] ; (c) Things 
as they ought to be [the typical —aesthetic truth]. 
(2) The poet’s medium of expression is the Diction, 
unadorned, or with an admixture of strange words and 
metaphors — indeed, there are various modifications of 
ordinary usage that we concede to the poets. (3) Fur- 
thermore, the standard of correctness is not the same 
in Poetry as in Politics; it is different in Poetry from 
that in any other art. [A citizen who fulfilled his duty 
to the State and in private life would satisfy the stand- 
ard of correctness in Politics and Ethics; but to satisfy 
the standard of correctness in tragedy, for example, the 
hero must come short of perfect justice and goodness. 
Cf. p. 42.] Within the limits of poetry there can be 
two kinds of errors, the one (a) directly involving the 
art, the other (b) adventitious. If the poet has chosen 
something for the object of his imitation, and through 
want of capacity fails properly to represent what he has 
in mind, this is (a) a fault in his art itself. But let us . 
suppose that he has made an incorrect choice in the 
object he wishes to represent; let us suppose, for ex- 
ample, that he wishes to represent a moving horse with 
both right legs thrown forward; or suppose that he 
makes a mistake in any other special branch of know- 
ledge — medicine or the like; or let the impossible 
objects which he represents be what they may. If he 
succeeds in duly imitating the object which he has in 
mind, his mistake is not (a) one that concerns the Poetic 
Art itself. It is (b) adventitious. These, then, are the 
considerations from which one must proceed in answer- 
ing the strictures of the critics. 


THE ART OF POETRY 87 


Let us first consider the strictures relating to the 
Poetic Art itself. If impossibilities have been repre- 
sented, the poet is guilty of a fault. Yet such impossi- 
bilities may still be justified, if their representation serves 
the purpose of the art itself — for we must remember 
what has been said of the end of poetry; that is, they 
are justified if they give the passage they are in, or some 
other passage, a more astounding effect. The pursuit of 
Hector (see p. 81) is a case in point, being justified by 
the poetic effect. But if the ends of poetry could have 
been as well or better subserved by scientific accuracy, 
the error is not justified ; for the poet ought if possible 
to make no mistakes whatever. 

Again, when an error is found, one must always ask: 
Is the mistake adventitious, arising from ignorance in 
some special field of knowledge, or does it concern the 
art of imitation as such? If a painter thinks a female 
deer has horns, for example, that is less of an error 
. than to fail in representing his actual conception. 

Furthermore, it may be objected that the representa- 
tion of the poet is not true [i.e., to things as they are 
or have been]. The answer to this may be that they 
are represented as they ought to be [that they are 
typical]; just as Sophocles affirmed that he himself 
drew men as they ought to be, and Euripides men as 
they are. But if the representation be true neither to 
fact nor to the ideal, the answer may be that it accords 
with current legends and popular belief: ‘ People say 
so. The unedifying poetical tales about the gods, for 
instance, are, very possibly, neither true nor the pref- 
erable thing to relate; in fact, they may be as false and 


Impossibil- 
ities may be 
justified in 
part 


Yet the Poet 
ought really 
to make no 
mistakes 


Is the fault 
Intrinsic or 
Adventitious 


Poetic Truth 


Artistic 
Propriety 


88 ARISTOTLE 


immoral as Xenophanes declares. But they certainly are 
in keeping with popular belief. Of still other things 
which are objected to in poetry, one may possibly say, 
not that they are better than the fact here and now, but 
that the fact was so at the time [historical truth]. Such 
is the case with the description of the arms of Diomed 
and his companions in the /4ad: ‘Their spears were 
driven into the ground, erect upon the spikes of the 
butts’ [the practice described in Homer is not better 
than the method familiar to his critics, but it accords 
with historical truth]; for that was the custom then, 
as it is in Illyria even now. 

As for the question whether something said or done 
by some one in a poem is proper or not: to answer this 
we must not merely consider the intrinsic quality of the 
act or utterance, to see whether it is noble or base in 
itself ; we must also consider (a) the person who does 
or says the thing, (b) the person to whom it is done or 
said, or (c) when, or (d) in whose interest, or (e) with 
what motive, it is done or said. Thus we must exam- 
ine any questionable word or act, to see whether the 
motive of the agent is to secure some greater good or to 
avert a greater evil. [The speeches of Satan in Paradise 
Lost are not morally good in themselves. They have 
“semblance of worth, not substance’. But the first, 
for example, is poetically good. We must bear in 
mind that it is addressed by (a) the Father of Lies 
to (b) another demon, (c) nine days after their plunge 
into Hell, (d) in the interest of the speaker, (e) with 
the motive of bettering his condition. ] 

The justice or injustice of other criticisms must be 


THE ART OF POETRY 89 


decided by the principles of poetic diction. For exam- 
ple, objection may be raised to a passage because the 
critic fails to see that the poet is using (a) a strange 
word, At the beginning of the //zad, the angry god is 
represented as first assailing the oureas. Now by oureas 
Homer may possibly mean not mules, but sentinels. 
{The critics found it difficult to believe that Apollo’s 
arrows would strike the camp-animals before the men.] 
And when the poet says of Dolon, ‘He was ill-favored 
of figure’, the meaning may be, not that his body was 
deformed, but that his face was ugly; for well-figured 
is the Cretan expression for wel/-featured. [The ques- 
tion apparently was raised: If Dolon was deformed, 
how could he also be ‘swift of foot’ ?] So, too, * Mix 
the drink /zvelzer’ may mean, not * Mix it stronger’, 
as though for sots, but ‘ Mix it quicker’. 
Other difficulties may be explained under this head, 
if we regard the language as (b) metaphorical. Homer 
says: ‘Now ad/ gods and men were sleeping through 
the night’; and at the same time he tells us: ‘And 
whenever he looked at the Trojan plain, he marvelled 
at the sound of flutes and pipes.’ [I.e., some men were 
awake.], The difficulty may be resolved if we regard all 
as used metaphorically for many, since al/ is a species 
of the genus many. So also we may explain, “And she 
alone hath no part in the baths of Ocean’; for the other 
northern constellations that do not set are not familiar 
like the Great Bear, and the one which is very familiar 
may be figuratively called the only one. 

Again, a passage that is censured may be defended 
after a study of the pronunciation. Thus didomen de hot 


a. An appeal 
to the nature 
of the 
Medium 


b. Metaphors 


c. Testing 
the Pronun- 
ciation 


d. Testing 
the Punctu- 
ation 


e. Possible 
Ambiguities 
in Grammar 


f. An appeal 
to Special 
Usage 


9O ARISTOTLE 


(‘We grant him his prayer’) has been criticized as mak- 
ing Zeus a liar; and to men hou cataputhetat ombro 
(‘the wood of which ’ — oak and pine—‘is rotted with 
rain’), as not being scientifically true. In such cases 
the solution of the difficulty may be like that of Hip- 
pias the Thasian, who changed the accent to azdémen, 
and the breathing to ou: ‘Grant him his prayer’ — 
where the lying rests with the deceptive dream, rather 
than with Zeus; and ‘is zo¢ rotted with rain’ — which 
is true of oak and pine. 

Other difficulties one may solve by considering (d) the 
punctuation, as in the sentence of Empedocles: * Sud- 
denly things became mortal that before had learnt to be 
immortal and things unmixed before mixed.’ [If the 
passage is censured when a comma follows ‘unmixed’, 
perhaps the comma ought to precede ‘ mixed ’.] 

Or we may have to consider (e) the grammatical 
ambiguity of an expression, as in the passage: ‘Of the 
night sl/eon two watches are spent’; if p/eon means 
‘more than’ two watches, the phrase contradicts ‘but a 
third part still remains’. But the solution may be that 
the expression means ‘ fz// two watches’. 

Or we may have to appeal (f) to the custom of lan- 
guage. Just as we now call wine and water ‘wine’, so 
Homer in speaking of ‘the greave of new-wrought ¢z72’, 
from which the spear rebounded, may mean a metallic 
alloy of tin. And as we call workers in iron chalkeas 
( braziers’), so Homer may call Ganymede the ‘ qwme- 
pourer to Zeus’, although the gods drink, not wine, but 
nectar. This difficulty, however, may be resolved as an 
instance of (b) metaphor. 


THE ART OF POETRY QI 


Finally, a passage in dispute may be defended through 
an appeal to (g) the several possibilities of meaning ina 
single word —as distinguished from (e) ambiguities in 
grammar. When a word seems to involve some incon- 
sistency, one should consider the different senses it may 
bear in its context. For example: ‘There’ (at or in the 
third and golden layer of the shield) ‘ scheto’ (‘stuck’ or 
‘stayed ’) ‘the spear of bronze.’ One should ask in how 
many ways we may take scheto. [Homer says that the 
spear pierced two layers, and implies that the next re- 
mained unpierced ; but if the spear s¢wck in the third 
layer, it must have pierced that also. The alleged in- 
consistency disappears if we consider that scheto may 
also mean stayed: ‘There stayed the spear of bronze.’] 

In other words, the right procedure is just the oppo- 
site of the method condemned by Glaucon, who says of 
certain critics: ‘They begin with some unwarranted 
assumption, and having pronounced judgment in a 
matter, they go on to argue from this; and if what the 
poet says does not agree with what they happen to 
think, they censure his supposed misstatement.’ Such 
is the fashion in which the question about Icarius, in 
the Odyssey, has been handled. The critics begin by 
imagining that he was a Lacedaemonian, and accord- 
ingly they think it strange that his grandson, Telemachus, 
did not meet him on the journey to Lacedaemon. But 
perhaps the case may be as the Cephallenians say ; for 
their story is that Odysseus took a wife from Cephal- 
lenia, and that her father’s name was not Icarius, but 
Icadius. It is doubtless a mistake of the critics that has 
given rise to the problem. 


g. Possible 
Homonyms 


Right and 
wrong Pro- 
cedure in 
Criticism 


The test for 
alleged im- 
possibilities 


For alleged 
improbabil- 
ities 


For alleged 
contradic- 
tions in 
language 


Where the 
critic had 
best look for 
errors 


92 ARISTOTLE 


In general, questions as to the poet’s use of impossi- 
bilities must be decided by an appeal either to (a) the end 
of Poetry, or to (b) ideal truth, or to (c) what is commonly 
believed. For the ends of Poetry, (a) a thing really im- 


‘possible, yet on the face of it convincing, is preferable 


to one that, though possible, does not win belief. And 
if such men as Zeuxis painted be called too beautiful, 
the pictures may be defended as (b) true to the ideal ; 
for the type necessarily excels the average and actual. 

What the critics term improbable one must judge by 
an appeal to popular belief, and by an attempt to show 
that on occasion the thing may not be improbable ; for 
[as Agathon suggested (see p. 64)] it is likely that 
something improbable will now and then occur. 

As for alleged contradictions in the poet’s language, 
these we must scrutinize as one deals with sophistical 
refutations in an argument; that is, as is done in 
dialectics. —Then we can see whether the poet in his 
several statements refers to the same thing, in the same 
relation, and in the same sense, and can judge whether 
or not he has contradicted what he himself says, or what 
a person of intelligence normally assumes as true. 

The censure of the critic is just, however, when it is 
directed against improbability in the plot, and, similarly, 
against depravity in the agents ; that is, when there is no 
inner necessity for a base agent, and when the irrational 
element serves no artistic purpose. Thus there is no ade- 
quate reason for Aegeus’ appearing in Euripides’ Wedea, 
and none for the baseness of Menelaus in his Ovestes. 

We see, accordingly, that all the strictures of critics 
are reducible to five species. Objections are raised 


THE ART OF POETRY 93 


against poetry on the ground that something is either 
(1) impossible, (2) irrational (improbable), (3) morally 
hurtful, (4) contradictory, or (5) contrary to artistic cor- 
rectness. The answers to these objections must be sought 
under one or another of the heads enumerated above 
(see pp. 85-86). And these answers are twelve in num- 
ber. [The twelve problems and answers apparently cor- 
respond to criticisms that touch the poetic art (1) directly, 
(2) indirectly ; or that touch the poet as an imitator of 
things (3) as they were or are, (4) as they are said or 
thought to be, (5) as they ought to be; or that bear 
on (6) strange words, (7) metaphors, (8) pronunciation, 
(9) punctuation, (10) grammatical ambiguity, (11) cus- 
tom of language, (12) different meanings of the same 
word. | 

The question finally suggests itself: Which is the 
higher form of art, Epic Poetry or Tragedy? Those 
who favor the Epic may argue thus: The less vulgar 
form is the higher ; and that which addresses the better 
audience is always the less vulgar. [Compare Milton: 
‘ Fit audience find though few.’] If this be so, it is ob- 
vious that a pantomimic art like Tragedy is exceedingly 
vulgar ; for [so the argument runs] the performers sup- 
pose that unless they throw in something of their own, 
the audience will not understand what is meant, and 
hence they indulge in all sorts of bodily motions. [Com- 
pare Hamlet’s advice to the Players: ‘Nor do not saw 
the air too much with your hand, thus, but use all gently.’] 
An inferior flute-player, for instance, when throwing the 
discus is to be represented, will twist and twirl like the 
athlete himself; or if he is playing the Scy//a, he will 


Summary 


Five Sources 
of Objections 


Three Main 
Consider- 
ations 


Twelve 
special Prob- 
lems and 
Solutions 


CHAPTER 26 


A General 
Problem: 
Which is 
higher, the 
Epic or 
Tragedy 


The Case 
against 
Tragedy 


The Answer 
is Twofold 


1. As to 
gestures 


94 ARISTOTLE 


clutch at the leader of the Chorus. Tragedy, then, is 
said to be an art of this kind, and to lie under the same 
condemnation as the earlier actors passed upon the next 
generation. Thus Mynniscus used to call Callippides 
‘the Ape’, for overacting his parts ; and the actor Pin- 
darus, too, got a similar reputation. And as the later 
generation is held to be worse than the earlier among 
the actors, so the whole art of Tragedy, which is later 
than the Epic, is considered inferior to it. So we are 
told that the Epic is addressed to a cultivated audience, 
which does not need gestures and postures, and Tragedy 
to an audience that is inferior and does. Accordingly, 
if Tragedy is a vulgar art, it evidently is the lower form. 

The reply to this argument is twofold. (1) First, 
then, as to gesture and movement. (a) The censure at- 
taches, not to the art of the poet as such, but to the art 
of his interpreter. And it touches the interpreter of 
Epic as well as Tragic poetry; for the epic reciter may 
likewise overdo the gesticulation —as did Sosistratus ; 
and it may be overdone in a singing contest —as by 
Mnasitheus the Opuntian. 

(b) In artistic representation, we are not to condemn 
all bodily movement ; otherwise we should have to con- 
demn outright the art of Dancing. What we must object 
to is the attitudes and gestures of the ignoble — the 
very objection that was brought against Callippides. The 
same criticism is passed on certain actors of to-day, who 
in assuming the rdle of women are said to lack the 
bearing of ladies. 

(c) It is quite possible for Tragedy to produce its 
characteristic effect without any movement or gesture, in 


THE ART OF POETRY 95 


just the same way as Epic Poetry; for if we merely 
read a play, its quality becomes evident. Accordingly, 
if it be true that Tragedy is superior in all other respects, 
this alleged weakness need not be present. 

(2) Secondly, one must argue in favor of Tragedy 
(a) that it contains every element found in Epic Poetry 
— since it may have a use even for the epic metre; and 
that in addition (see pp. 27, 79) it has no inconsiderable 
elements of its own in Spectacular effects and in Music 
— and through the music the characteristic pleasure is 
distinctly heightened. 

Next, (b) the greater vividness of Tragedy is felt 
when we read the play as well as when we see it acted. 

Furthermore, (c) the tragic imitation attains its end 
in less space. And this may be deemed an advantage, 
since the concentrated effect is more delightful than one 
which is long drawn out, and so diluted. Consider the 
result, for example, if one were to lengthen out Oedipus 
the King into the number of lines in the Ziad. 

And again, (d) the unity of action is less strict in the 
epic poets, as is shown by the number of subjects for 
tragedies derived from any one of their works. Conse- 
quently, if an epic poet takes a strictly unified story, 
either he will tell it briefly, and it will seem abrupt, or 
he will make it conform to the usual heroic scale, and 
then it will seem thin and watery. By a less strict unity 
in an epic [even the best] is meant a case in which the 
story is made up of a plurality of actions. Thus the /Zad 
has many such parts, and the Odyssey also; and each 
of these parts is of some magnitude. Nevertheless these 
two poems are as perfect in structure as the nature of 


2. Tragedy 
is more in- 
clusive, com- 
pact, and 
effective 


The Final 
Answer 


Conclusion 


96 ARISTOTLE 


the Epic will permit ; and the action represented in each 
is as nearly as may be a unit. 

If, then, Tragedy is superior to the Epic in all these 
respects, and particularly in fulfilling its special function 
as a form of poetry; and if we recall, as we must (see 
pp. 43-44), that the two forms of serious poetry are to 
give us, not any chance pleasure, but the definite pleas- 
ure we have mentioned — it is clear that Tragedy, since 
it attains the poetic end more effectively than the Epic, 
is the higher form of the two. 

So much for Tragedy and Epic Poetry as forms of 
Poetry in general; for their several kinds and constitu- 
ent parts, with the number and nature of each; for the 
causes of success or failure in the two forms; and for 
critical objections, and the solutions to be employed 
in rejoinder. 


INDEX OF PROPER NAMES 


[References to Aristotle, to the Poetics, and to three names at the end of the 
Preface are omitted ; also a reference to the Deity, in the Introduction.] 


Abas 60 

Achilles 31, 41, 49, 52, 63, 75, 
76, 81 

Aegeus 92 

Aegisthus 43 

Aeschylus xix, xxiii, 13, 16, 35, 
47, 55, 62, 63, 75, 80, 83 

Agamemnon 32, 38 

Agathon 33, 52; 63, 64, 92 

Ajax 61 

Ajax, Sophocles’ 16 

Alcibiades 32 

Alcinous 55 

Alcmeon 42, 45, 46 

Amphiaraus 57 

Antheus, Agathon’s 33 

Antigone, Sophocles’ viii, 41, 46 

Antigonus 54 

Antonio 36 

Antony and Cleopatra 63 

Apollo 89 

Ares 71 

Argas 7 

Argos 34 

Ariphrades 75, 76, 85 

Aristophanes ix, xviii, 6, 8 

Aristotle’s Theory of Poetry, etc., 
Butcher’s xxix 

Aristotle’s Views on Music, etc., 
R. H. Bradley’s xxviii 

Arthur in Aizg John viii 

Astydamas 46 

As You Like It 50, 62 

Athenians 9 

Athens 16, 70 

Attic Theatre, Haigh’s xxix 

Aulis 55 


Aurengzebe, Dryden’s 26 
Award of the Arms 78 


Bacchae, Euripides’ 26 

Bacon xxi 

Bath Scene in the Odyssey vi, 54, 
82 

Beowulf 30 

Bible 5 

Biographia Literaria, Coleridge’s 
xvi n. 

Birds, Aristophanes’ 6 

Boileau ix 

Bradley, A. C. 58 

Bradley, R. H. xxix 

Bride of Lammermoor, Scott’s 43 

Browning xxiii 

Burke x, xvi, 58 

Butcher vi, x, xxix 

Byron ix, 25, 30 

Bywater vi, ix, x, xvii, xxvi, 20 


Callippides 94 

Carcinus 53, 57 

Carroll, Mitchell x 

Carthaginians 77 

Castelain xv n. 

Castelvetro ix, xv 

Catalogue of the Ships in the 
Lliad 78 

Cenct, Shelley’s so 

Centaur, Chaeremon’s 4 

Cephallenia 91 

Cephallenians 91 

Chaeremon 4, 81 

Chaucer 25 

Chionides 9 


98 INDEX 


Cicero xxv 

Classical Review X 
Claudius 64, 65 

Cleon 69 

Cleophon 7, 73 
Clytaemnestra 45, 47 
Coleridge xvi, 20 

Cook xvin. 

Cordelia 36 

Corneille 16 

Cornish, G. Warre xxviii 
Cowper 20 

Crabbe 73 

Crates 15 

Creon viii, xxvi, 26, 41, 46 
Cresphontes, Euripides’ 47 
Croce, B. xxii 

Cypria 78 

Cypria, Dicaeogenes’ 55 
Cyprus 70 


Danaus 36 

Darwin, Erasmus 4 

Daughters of Phineus 56 

Daughters of Phorcys, Aeschy- 
lus’ 62 

Defense of Poesy, Sidney’s xvin. 

Delphi 16 

Desdemona 27, 38 

Dialogues, Plato’s 4 

Dicaeogenes 55 

Diliad, Nicochares’ 7 

Diomed 88 

Dionysius 6 

Dionysus 26, 71 

Discoveries, Ben Jonson’s xv 

Doctor Faustus, Marlowe’s 34 

Dolon 89 

Donatello, in Hawthorne’s 
Marble Faun 37 

Don Juan, Byron’s 30 

Don Juan, Moliére’s xi 

Dorians 8, 9 

Dover 58 

Dryden ix, 25, 26 

Duncan 36 


Eden 55 
Edmund 50 
Education, Of. See Of Education 


Egypt 37 

Electra 55 

Electra, Sophocles’ 61, 83 

Empedocles xxill, 4, 70, 71, 90 

Epichares 74 

Epicharmus 8, 15 

Eriphyle 45, 46 

Ethics. See Nicomachean Ethics 

Euclid, the elder 74, 85 

Lumenides, Aeschylus’ 16 

Euripides xix, xxiii, xxviii, 16, 
24, 26, 38, 42, 43, 45, 47» 49: 
50, 54, 59, 63, 64, 75, 87, 92 

Lurypylus 78 


Faerie Queene, Spenser’s 7 

faustus. See Doctor Faustus 

fifteen Discourses on Art, Sit 
Joshua Reynolds’ xxv n. 

fortnightly Review xxviii 

France 16 

Frere, J. H. ix 

Furies 43, 60 


Ganymede go 

Glaucon gI 

Gloucester 58 

Goulston ix 

Governor of Egypt 36 

Greece xviii, 8, 69 

Greck Drama and the Dance, 
Cornish’s xxviii 

Greeks xvii, 19, 51 


Hades 62 

Haemon viii, 46 

Haigh xxix 

Hamlet 41, 47, 64, 65, 93 

Flamlet viii, 33, 43 

Hawthorne 37 

Hector 81, 87 

Hegemon of Thasos 7 

Heinsius xv n. 

Hell 88 

LTelle 47 

Leracleid 30 

Heracles 30 

Herdsman in Oedipus the King 
61, 64 

Hermione 53 


INDEX 99 


Hermo-caico-xanthus 69 

Herodotus 31, 32 

Hippias of Thasos 90 

Hogarth 6 

Homer xxviii, 4, 5, 7, 8, II, 30, 
a1, 52, 06, 78; 79, 81, 82, 83, 
84, 85, 88, 89, 90, 91 

Horace ix, xv, xviii 

Hubert in Aing John viii 


Iago 27, 64, 65 

Icadius 91 

Icarius 91 

ldylis of Theocritus 6 

Wiad, 12, 05, 31, 41,51, 52,63, 
65, 69, 75; 78, 79, 81, 88, 89, 95 

Ilium 30, 55, 63, 78 

Illyria 88 

Iphigenia 38, 47, 50, 55 

Lphigenia among the Taurians, 
Euripides’ xxvili, 38, 47, 54, 
i Da 

Iphigenia at Aulis, Euripides’ 50 

Ithaca 84 

Lvanhoe 43 

Ixion 61 


Jacob 36 

Jocasta 38, 64, 65 
Jonson, Ben xv andn. 
Joseph 36, 37 

Julius Caesar 33 
Jupiter xxv 


King Arthur and His Round 
Table, Frere’s 7 

King John viii 

King Lear xxvi, 36, 43, 50, 58, 63 

King Richard the Second 50 

King Richard the Third 63 


Kipling 73 


Lacedaemon 91 

Lacedaemonian 91 

Laertes 37 

Laius 37, 51, 83 

Lay of Alcinous in the Odyssey 


55 
Lear 36, 41, 44 
Lear. See King Lear 


Leonardo da Vinci xx, xxv 

‘Lesson in Anatomy’, Rem- 
brandt’s 10 

Libation-Pourers, Aeschylus’ 47, 


55 
Littledale, H. xvi n. 
Little Iliad 78 
Lockwood xvi n. 
Love, Coleridge’s 20 
Lynceus 36 
Lynceus of Theodectes 36, 60 
Lyrical Ballads xvi n., 6 


Macbeth 36, 41 

Macbeth xxvi, 36, 43 

Magnes 9 

Marathon 74 

Marble Faun, Hawthorne’s 37 

Margites, the Homeric 11, 12 

Margoliouth x 

Marlowe 34, 59 

Mazzoni xv 

Medea 45 

Medea, Euripides’ 50, 92 

Megara 8 

Megarians 8 

Melanippe the Wise, Euripides’ 50 

Meleager 42 

Mendicant Odysseus 78 

Menelaus 49, 92 

Merchant of Venice 36, 43, 50, 51 

Merope 47 

Messenger in Ocdipus the King 
35, 61 

Milton xvi, xxii, 5, 19, 20, 25, 
81, 93 

Minerva xxv 

Mitys x, 34 

Mnasitheus of Opus 94 

Moliere xi 

Mona Lisa xxv 

Mynniscus 94 

Mysia 83 

Mysians, Aeschylus’ 83 

Neoptolemus 78 

New Testament 53 

Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle’s 


42 
Niobe 63 


I0O0 


Odysseus 30, 37, 41, 49, 54, 55» 
56, 70, 75, 82, 83,91 
Odysseus with the False Tidings 


6 

Oden. Wounded, Sophocles’ 
46 

Odyssey 12, 15, 30, 31, 375 41, 43, 
54, 55, 56, 60, 75, 78, 79, 82, 
83, 91,95 . 

Oedipus xxvi, 26,. 35, 36, 37; 40, 
41, 42, 46, 48, 51, 61 

Oedipus the King, Sophocles’ 
SXV, XAVi 255, 10.5 27 sah ke 
38, 44, 47, 48, 51, 57, 61, 83, 95 

Of Education, Milton’s xvin., xxii 

Oliver in As You Like St So. 

On Foets, Aristotle’s dialogue 
XVii, XXVIl, 53 

On the Sublime and Beautiful, 
Burke xvi n. 

Orestean Trilogy of Aeschylus 
80 

Orestes 32, 38, 42, 43, 45) 47» 54s 
55: 57 59; 60, 61 

Orestes, Euripides’ 49, 92 

Othello 26, 27, 38, 41, 45, 52, 64 

Othello 19, 38, 43, 44, 61 


Paradise Lost 31, 41, 55, 88 
Parnassus 30 

Pauson 6 

Péléided 72 

Péleidou 72 

Peleus, Sophocles’ 61 
Peloponnese 9 

Pelops 40, 53 

Penelope 82 

Pericles xix 

Phaeacians 83 

Phaedrus, Plato’s 28 
Phidias xxv 

Philoctetes xxiii 
Philoctetes 78 

Philoctetes, Aeschylus’ 75 
Philomela 54 

Philoxenus 7 

Phormis 15 

Pindarus, the actor 94 
Plato xviii, xx, xxiv, 2, 4, 5, 28 
Plautus 69 


INDEX 


Plutarch x 

Poets. See On Poets 

Politics, Aristotle’s xxi, 20 

Polygnotus 6, 25 

Polyidus the Sophist 55, 59 

Poly-machaero-plagides 69 

Polyphemus (Cyclops) 7, 37, 41, 
75 

Pope ix 

Portia 36, 50 

Poseidon 37, 60 

Prometheus, Aeschylus’ 62 

Prometheus Bound, Aeschylus’ 
35, 62 

Protagoras 65, 66 


Racine 16 

Raphael 6 

Regan 50 

Rembrandt Io, 25 
Reynolds, Sir Joshua xxv n. 
Rhesus Xix 

Rhetoric, Aristotle’s xvi, 64 
Richard II 50 

Richards, Herbert x 
Rubens 25 

Ruskin xx, 52 


Sack of Ilium 78 

Sailing of the Fleet 78 

Salamis 77 

Samson Agonistes 19 

Satan, Milton’s 55, 88 

Scott 43 

Scylla 93 

Scylla of Timotheus 49 

Second Messenger in Oedipus 
the King 27 

Shakespeare 19, 25, 27, 33, 36, 
45) 47) 51, 52, 58, 59, 61, 62, 
63, 64, 65 

Shawcross xvi n. 

Shelley xx, 5, 25, 50 

Shylock 36 

Sicily 8, 15, 77 

Sicyonians 9 

Sidney, Sir Philip xvi 

Sinon 78 

Sisyphus 63 

Socrates xxiv, 3, 28 


INDEX 


Sophocles xix, xxvii, 8, 13, 15, 
16, 19, 26, 35, 41, 46, 51, 53, 
54, 57> 61, 64, 83, 87 

Sophron 3 

Sosistratus 94 

Spartan Women 78 

Spenser 7, 72 

Sthenelus 73 

Stobaeus xv n. 

Sublime and Beautiful. See On 
the Sublime and Beautiful 


Tasso xv 

Tegea 83 

Telegonus 46 
Telemachus 91 
Telephus 42, 44, 83 
Tereus, Sophocles’ 54 
Thebes 4o, 51 
Theocritus 6 
Theodectes 36, 56, 60 
Theodore 68 

Theseid 30 

Theseus 30 

Thomas 53 
Thucydides 32 
Thyestes 40, 42 
Thyestes of Carcinus 53 


IOI 


Timotheus 7, 49 

Trojan Women 78 

Troy 81 

Tydeus of Theodectes 56 
Tyro 53 

Zyro, Sophocles’ 53 
Tyrwhitt x 


Uriel, Milton’s 55 


Vahlen ix 

Vida ix 

Vinci. See Leonardo da Vinci 

Westminster Review xxix 

White Doe of Rylstone, Words- 
worth’s 20 

Winter's Tale 53, 57 

Women of Phthia, Sophocles’ 61 

Wordsworth xvi, 4, 6, 20, 25, 27, 
76 


Xenarchus 3 
Xenophanes 88 


Zeus 90 
Zeuxis 25, 92 


“san } iP Mak (SO inti y's AS yet ban. cf V3 te ve . ‘ee 
i \ La aa - 


“A 


t te 


: 
26 
poet 


} \ 











Th" wg ee 
Oy a hs Va 
Fs tT he aie 
at ‘an 
Shae 
et 
ee! 
Fok Ni ' 
8 a A ak 
i J ra 
‘ 7 4 
! 
" 
‘ 
¥ y 
ti 
i 
. 
. 
7 
! 
u 
\ ; ji 
iy + - A h 
j 4 oe 
, se ic i a j iu 
4 \ x y, 
Mmiv hy : sd 4 Wee 









(ah el aah ahs NAL i a! a 
ts ip Meh Ay Pe GO ea. 
er uF ot ie, Mi ie "3 wit fi . 
ie Oana Bey Bh ae) ie = ; 








| 
' ¢ yet 
‘ ‘ 
ot y 
, A 
‘ Li j t 
i 
- 
: 
' 
; 
i 
\ * 
Fy 
ry 
‘ 
mi . 
! nl 
of 
H ' 
® H 
fi 
fs 
ui: ) 
¥ 4 
ba A 
2 : 
aren 
* yy 
; ‘ . 
i 5 
‘ ‘ 
( 
: 
Pi 
‘ 
‘, 
yi 
j 
' 
fx : 
& 4 
, Li 
7} 
A NH} 
f 
1 H 
A : 
PAT 
ih 
4 your 
; Lm \ 
he 
La NK 4 
i ¥, hw 
a a4 Ls 
4 ; 7 A 
ay, a F a 
ify 7 
ee 
, \ tt 
; h : 
, She . i} 
Hey, " a 
a ie 
a Ca} A, 
, Ly ¥) 
’ ny y} 
\ 
wos 
i‘, } 
‘ ms? 
, ul i) 
« 
"  § 
- ‘ ; 
4 ; 
ow Gh 
‘ , i 
AS he } PM, 
4 pe é j 
‘ Lit ; 
y x % t pres a 
ae 
W @ 
} a 7 
Me " 
; \ 4M 
» Oye P 
f oe “ y ’ 
} ¢ 
the ff et 
5 ae? re 
: rh 
av : q i R 
r - Fe t 








RIE 


tesa 


q 
a 
i 


» a a 


ss 


vee 





UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS-URBANA 















































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































